[aknicol]

Thanks for the feedback! Very glad to hear that you like the site so much. I agree with a lot of your suggestions, and some of them (like the filters automatically updating) we're going to be implementing soon. To answer your questions, it took about 9 months to build the site (RoR), although the majority of that time was spent developing a back-end that we use to manage all of the hotel and review data.

[avalaunch]

Awesome. So what do the stars represent? Is that a different sort of rating for each hotel?

[aknicol]

It is actually just the "standard" 5-star hotel rating scale. (I put standard in quotation marks because there isn't actually a worldwide common standard for what constitutes e.g. a 4-star hotel.) We've been wondering about whether it is confusing for people to display this alongside our own TripExpert Score. Sounds like you think it is?

[avalaunch]

Yeah I really had no idea what it was. I think the TripExpert number score is enough. That's the number that matters. At least that's what you're telling me, so why muddle that with another number.

The main reason to include the 5 star rating would be if your score was relative to that. For example, an 80 at a 5 star hotel was much better than an 80 at a 3 star hotel. But I don't think that's the case, is it?

[aknicol]

I agree. We're probably going to delete it. Thanks for the feedback!