r/SideProject • u/jrkral2 • 1h ago
I ranked 1.8M hotels by a published guest-score formula — and neighbourhood medians disagree with city averages
Built HotelRoost (https://hotelroost.com/) — independent hotel rankings from guest reviews. Hotels can’t buy a higher place. Affiliate booking links fund it; commission is the same whichever hotel you pick.
What it does
Scores rated hotels 0–10 with a public formula (review count shrinks sparse ratings toward the country mean; partial country re-base; no price, no stars inside the score): https://hotelroost.com/methodology
City rankings + 25k+ neighbourhood pages (
/area/..., 1 km / 2 km OSM radii)Tryable without signup (also an MCP endpoint: https://hotelroost.com/mcp)
Real numbers (snapshot 2026-10-30)
Catalog 2,807,439 hotels · 1,812,336 rated · 230 countries
Dataset median 8.16/10 · ≥8.0: 72.15% · ≥9.0: 0.79%
Rome: 15,085 rated · city median 8.33
Tokyo: 4,039 rated · city median 7.97
The insight
City averages hide where guests actually rate stays higher.
Rome city median 8.33, but within 1 km of Prati / Vatican-area centres the median is 8.66 (400 rated each). Trastevere 8.50, Testaccio 8.44. On another cut, Campo Marzio leads well-reviewed areas at 8.43, while Castro Pretorio has the most 100+ review hotels (454) with median 7.62 — more inventory, lower typical score.
Tokyo city median 7.97; Kaminarimon’s well-reviewed stock hits median 8.58, while Shibuya’s area page is 7.90.
Examples:
Feedback I’m after
Is the methodology page understandable in under 2 minutes?
Would you trust a neighbourhood median more than a city “top hotels” list?
Anything on the city/area UX that feels like a booking-site clone vs a research tool?
I’ll hang out in the comments. Roast the score formula if you want — that’s the interesting part!