What a guesthouse rating is worth

A guesthouse with 4.8 stars sounds settled. Then you look closer and the 4.8 rests on nine reviews, six of them from the same month the place opened.

Across the 483 guesthouses we hold ratings for, the median score among those with a meaningful number of reviews is 4.6, and 63% sit at 4.5 or above. A good score is common enough that it separates almost nothing, and the useful question is a different one.

Why we hide some ratings

We show a rating only when a guesthouse has at least 15 reviews. Below that, the number moves too much: one unhappy guest swings a 5.0 to a 4.4, and one enthusiastic friend does the reverse.

Of the guesthouses on file, 97 currently fall below that line and a further 10 have no reviews recorded at all. Their pages show no score. That is not a judgement on the house — new and small is not the same as bad, and on an island of four hundred people a guesthouse may simply never accumulate reviews at the rate a Maafushi hotel does.

What to read instead

• The number of reviews, not the score. Forty reviews at 4.3 tells you more than nine at 4.9.
• Where the house sits. On these islands the walk to the bikini beach matters daily. Every guesthouse page here states that distance, measured from coordinates rather than claimed.
• How many other options the island has. Somewhere with twenty guesthouses forgives a bad choice. Somewhere with three does not.

Where these figures come from

Ratings and review counts come from Google Places and carry the date they were fetched; they are refreshed on a schedule and are a snapshot, not a live feed. We do not write, solicit, edit or weight reviews, and no commercial relationship affects which houses appear or in what order.

We have not stayed in these guesthouses. Everything above is arithmetic on public review data, and it is worth exactly what that is worth.