Who writes this
Prime Hotel Picks covers hotels in India. Palace hotels in Rajasthan, backwater properties in Kerala, business hotels in Bengaluru, hostels for people travelling on very little. The aim is narrow: help you work out where to stay in a particular city, and tell you what is wrong with each option as well as what is good about it.
There is one writer. If you see a byline on this site, it is mine.
What I do not claim
Plenty of travel sites imply that a writer personally stayed at every property they cover. I have not, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Writing "I woke up to the view from my suite" about a hotel I have never checked into would make everything else on the site worthless.
So the guides here are research, clearly labelled as research. Where I have not been able to confirm something, the article says so instead of filling the gap with confident-sounding invention.
- I do not run fake staff profiles or invented co-authors.
- I do not publish star ratings or review counts that I made up.
- I do not claim first-hand photography. Every hotel photograph is credited to the person who actually took it, on the photo credits page.
- I do not accept payment from a hotel in exchange for a favourable write-up.
How the research is actually done
For each property I work through the same list.
- The hotel's own published material. Room categories, sizes, check-in times, published rates, restaurant names, what is included. This establishes what the hotel says about itself.
- Rates across more than one booking platform, on the same day, for a comparable date. Single-platform rates are unreliable. Anything quoted on this site is a range, with the month I checked it stated next to the number.
- Guest reviews read in bulk, not cherry-picked. I am looking for complaints that recur across many months and many reviewers. One angry review about a cold breakfast tells you nothing. Forty reviews mentioning traffic noise on the same side of the building tells you a great deal.
- Location checked against a map. Distance to the station, the airport, the thing you actually came to see. Hotels are very good at describing themselves as central.
- What it costs to get in the door beyond the room rate: taxes, mandatory meal plans, airport transfers, whether the famous restaurant is open to people who are not staying there.
About the rates on this site
Indian hotel rates move a lot. A palace room in Udaipur can double between a wet September and the last week of December. Every rate on this site is a range rather than a single number, and every range carries the month it was checked.
If you are reading a guide months after that date, treat the numbers as a rough sense of where a property sits rather than a quote. Check current rates before you book. I update guides when I revisit them, and the revision date is at the top of each one.
How this site makes money
Two ways, both worth stating plainly.
Advertising. The site carries display advertising. Advertisers have no say in which hotels appear or what is written about them, and I do not see which hotel an ad is promoting before publishing a guide.
Affiliate links. Some booking links may earn a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. Where that applies it is disclosed on the page. A hotel does not get included, excluded, praised or criticised on the basis of whether a commission exists. Several properties recommended here have no affiliate programme at all, and at least one hotel in most guides is one I suggest you skip.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I want to know, particularly if you have stayed somewhere I have written about and found the description off. Rates change, restaurants close, management changes and a good hotel becomes an average one. Write to contact@primehotelpicks.com and I will correct the page and note the change.
More on the limits of what is published here is set out in the disclaimer.