Editorial Policy
No paid placements, no pay-to-be-listed. How a hotel ends up on a shortlist, what the partner label means, and what we do when we get it wrong.
How a hotel gets on a shortlist
Three sources, combined. First, direct editorial research: the hotel’s own site, the most recent room photos, the current room-rate range, and where possible a stay in the past 24 months. Second, cross-checking against fresh guest reviews from Google and at least one of the OTA aggregators to sanity-check recurring complaints. Third, the historical directory record: we have tracked more than forty hotels through rebrands, management changes, and refurbishments since 2002, and that memory informs which hotels are still worth the recommendation.
Hotels we would not pick for a real trip are left off. A sestiere page is not trying to list every hotel in the sestiere, it is trying to list the four or five you should actually consider.
Partner vs listed
A listed hotel is one we recommend on an editorial basis. No money changes hands and the hotel has no say in the write-up.
A partner hotel is a listed hotel that also runs the no-prepayment direct booking path inherited from the 2002 directory. Readers can book direct and pay at the hotel on arrival; we receive a small commission from the hotel on realised bookings. The partner label is only applied to hotels that would be listed on editorial merit anyway; we have turned down partner requests from hotels that did not make the editorial cut.
No paid placement. No pay-to-be-listed. Partner commission is disclosed on every partner hotel’s page.
Affiliate links and disclosure
Most links on the site are either internal, or to official primary sources (the hotel’s own site, comune.venezia.it, labiennale.org, veneziaunica.it). If a page ever carries an affiliate link to a booking platform, it will be labelled as such under the button, with the commission disclosed plainly. That is the exception, not the default.
Corrections
Mistakes get fixed. If you spot a wrong walking minute, a closed hotel still showing as open, or a rate that has shifted outside the published band, write to [email protected]. Material corrections are noted at the bottom of the affected page with the date of the change. We do not edit a page silently.
If a hotel has slipped, we say so on the page before we drop it from the shortlist. A five-year directory entry does not quietly disappear.
Spotted something wrong?
Write to [email protected] with the page URL and what you noticed. Material corrections get a dated note on the page.