Guest reviews are confusing. This blog explains why I trust third parties like the AA, Visit England and Visit Wales far more.
Places you can stay may have:
Here is an example of the mess that this blog disentangles.
Ultimately, we want to know
But every website shows it differently!
| Site | What is on offer | How well it is run |
| The AA, Visit England, Visit Wales | Stars (1-5) on site inspection |
|
| Airbnb | Stars (4-5) by guests |
Badges by website |
| Booking.com | Stars (1-5) by website |
Marks out of 10 by guests |
| Cottages.com | Stars (1-5) by website |
Marks out of 5 by guests |
| Sykes | Ticks (1-5) manual, based on listing |
Stars (1-5) by guests |
| Trustpilot, Google Reviews, Facebook | Stars (1-5) by unverified reviewers |
|
Find out more below.
I give the Quality Assessments five stars. They do on-site visits, and they are independent – they don’t make money if the place is booked.
Visit Scotland and the AA both came to my holiday cottage, inspected it against their checklists, and interviewed me about how we run it. Sadly Visit Scotland are no longer running their scheme.
The checklists have an external standard. For example, the table below shows the criteria Visit Scotland had for beds in a self-catering accommodation.
| Two Star | Three Star | Four Star | Five Star |
|---|---|---|---|
| All beds to be full size (except those for children; or bed settees) |
As Two Star… plus All double beds to have access to both sides. |
As Three Star… plus All advertised sleeping spaces to be in bedrooms only. |
As Four Star… plus All bed to be full sized beds, including beds for children |
They grade all features, inside and out, consistently across properties. And their standard inventory means you will always find enough forks, and things like chopping boards and trays. They also stop random annoyances, like not enough comfy seats or not having a bedside light, which Airbnb is particularly notorious for.
It is a true, in-person, objective, measure of standards and quality.
Guest ratings and reviews, on the other hand, are a free-for-all.
The different platforms rate in different ways. The scores may be affected by spite or even by racism.1 And the people who’ve posted may never have been there.
In 2018, Forbes estimated that about 15% of online reviews are fake.2 Certainly, my inbox is spammed by people offering to provide me with stellar – fake – reviews.
So, girded with scepticism, let’s review the reviews.
One problem is that Airbnb attracts inexperienced hosts. It was originally about sofa surfing, and all about the vibe. They made it too easy, and it’s notorious for dirty places, with crazy check-out rules, and passive aggressive notes. That said, back in the day, the great photography meant that all the places seemed achingly hip.
But they still have the problem of weeding out the really bad places, so they are brutal and remove places with an average of 4.3 stars or less.
As a result, 98% of listings have 4 stars or more, according to this chart.3
Yeah, right.
When everything is ‘excellent’ nothing can stand out.
To fix this, they have introduced badges:
Top 1%
Top 5%
Top 10%
Guest Favourite
Superhost
If you are a guest, the badges work well enough. But a lot of great places are hard to find because of Airbnb’s algorithm, and because they are scored against other places on the platform, not against industry standards.
Airbnb’s star ratings skew high. Pre-covid data looked at places that were on TripAdvisor and on Airbnb and found that 14% of them scored higher on Airbnb.4 Go figure.
It’s not so bad for guests, but as we’ve seen, Airbnb punish hosts who get four star reviews.1
A special mention for racism
Airbnbing While Black is an actual problem: Requests to stay made by black people are 16% less less likely to be accepted.5 And in New York in 2012, non-black hosts could charge 12% more than black hosts.6
Booking.com’s system is functional, intuitive and based on data, so they surprised me into giving them four stars. 
They provide two ratings:
Booking.com’s star grade is based on the listing, so they have an objective checklist, though it isn’t transparent. They have effectively outsourced inspections to the guests.
This means that a place with 3 stars for amenities can still score 9+ from guests if they run their three star place well. But that’s ok. I’d rather stay in an awesome three star place than a place with four stars run by Basil Fawlty.
Guests give marks out of ten, and write verbal reviews. Booking.com don’t cut out the bad listings, their system means you can spot the wrong ‘uns when you use their site.
Anecdotally, there may be problems with disappearing reviews, and a loophole enables fake reviews,7
The star grades and guest scores on Booking.com are helpful for guests. You can filter by number of stars and or scores, and the stars are easier to understand than the ones on Airbnb. However, scam messages seem to be a problem.8
Small-scale hosts dislike Booking.com even more than Airbnb. Booking.com encourages late cancellations. And a couple of years ago Booking.com did not pay hosts for months.9 It is harder for hosts to use, and harder to help guests when there is a problem.
As a result, Airbnb has over 1000 places in or near Inverness. Booking.com lists about 700.
Four stars from me for Cottages.com, and three for Sykes for the way they rate their places.
They did not shine when Which? assessed them from the guests’ perspective.10 And they have a dreadful reputation with hosts for being high-handed, unfair, and unprofessional.11 They seem to think customer service is a zero sum game and aim to win disputes rather than resolve them. And
Cottages.com have a similar approach to Booking.com, with stars from the company, and marks out of five from the guests.
Sykes do it the other way round: ticks are assigned by Sykes ‘consultants’, and stars are based on customer reviews.
Neither do consistent on-site inspections, and Sykes now say their ratings are assigned by their ‘property consultants’.12
These sites cannot check whether or not someone’s stayed there, so they are targeted by review farms.
This earns them two stars from me – which was a bit of a surprise because they feel very useful.
Google are being forced to take fake reviews seriously in the UK, and to attach warnings when a company artificially boosts its stars.13 Despite this, scammers are blackmailing businesses by posting negative reviews.14
TripAdvisor stopped listing properties run by small scale hosts in late 2025. I am not sure if they still list hotels and villas. My first draft of this post detailed problems with fake reviews.15 Though of course they claim to be dealing with them.16 But the main thing is – don’t be anxious if the place you want to stay is not on TripAdvisor.
Ironically, Trustpilot also has a problem with fake reviews.17 Trustpilot charges businesses for additional functionality, including having negative reviews removed, favouring ‘profit over authenticity‘.18
I cannot leave Trustpilot without noting the scores of the review sites. Take them or leave them – who knows if we can trust them!
After a day spent researching and writing this post, I confess my brain was fritzed! As the old cartoon says ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’.
But digging around has taught me a lot.
Which why I like the organisations that do inspections. And why I mourn the fact that Visit Scotland is not doing them any more.
If you find a place you like on a third party site, search for it using their name or google image search. The third party sites charge up to 20% commission, so you will often get lower prices if you book direct.
My name is Ben, and I host the Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage at Noss Head. The different scores my cottage achieved made no sense to me; hence this blog post.
This post was written and researched by me, not AI. This is because AI makes stuff up. But facts matter. Here are the sites I used to write this blog.
Additional links go through to forums and other anecdotal sources.
