How we select
Of more than 9,000 Paris hotels, fewer than one in ten makes the cut. Here is the filter, in full, because a selection whose rule you cannot read is just another list.
- 8.0minimum score to be listed
- 8.5minimum score for the Secret label
- 25guest reviews minimum per place
- 20arrondissements covered
The threshold
A place appears on this site when travellers themselves give it at least 8.0 out of 10, from at least 25 guest reviews. From 8.5 it earns the Secret label. For apart-hotels the entry line is 8.5 straight away. Our selection draws on tens of thousands of verified guest reviews, and on nothing else: no panel of experts, no visits we did not make.
The result, in the current version: 9,158 hotels reviewed, 829 kept, 509 with the Secret label, and 171 apart-hotels. The 25-review minimum keeps out places too new or too little visited for the score to mean anything.
What is not for sale
No hotel can buy its place in the selection.
Nor can a hotel buy a better position: every page is ranked by score, then by number of reviews, and that is all. Some hotel links are partner links: if you book after clicking one, we earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. That commission changes neither whether a place is listed nor where it sits.
All twenty arrondissements
The selection covers every arrondissement of Paris, from the best stocked (the 9th arrondissement, 100 hotels) to the least (the 19th arrondissement, 6 hotels). The threshold is identical everywhere. A list of six places in the 19th is worth a list of a hundred in the 9th: they are the same 8.0.
What we write, and what we leave out
Every hotel page shows the score, the number of reviews, the street, the quartier and the declared facilities: terrace, bar, restaurant, fitness, free wifi. We do not show star ratings, room rates, spa facilities or breakfast, because we do not hold that information reliably for every place. A page that says less beats a page that makes things up.
Scores are written with one decimal and never rounded up. Review counts above 1,000 are rounded down to the hundred: 3,039 reviews reads as 3,000+ guest reviews.
Pages still being curated
Some pages (unique hotels, romantic hotels) are built by hand, address by address, out of the selection. Until they are ready, they say so. Pages by star rating, by price or by spa do not exist yet, for want of data we are willing to publish.
Updates
The selection is revised with each new version of the data. A place that drops below 8.0 leaves; a place that passes 8.5 gains the label. To report an error on a page, write to us.