How This Guide Is Built
The guide is written to a fixed structure, and this page sets out what that structure is, why it looks the way it does, and where the line is between what the guide says and what the official listing says.
The categories every entry is read through
Every property in the guide is written up through the same five categories: arrival, rooms, dining, public space and surroundings. That order is deliberate. A reader who knows the structure can move from one entry to the next without relearning how to read it, and the comparison between properties stays honest because nothing is hidden behind a different layout.
Arrival comes first because it is the least changeable fact about a place: the approach, the desk, the first impression a building makes on the ground. Rooms follow, then dining, then the public space the property gathers people into, and finally the surroundings that frame the whole thing.
The categories are not a score. An entry does not rate each of the five, and a strong arrival does not compensate for a thin dining section. The structure exists to make the differences between properties visible, not to rank them.
Where a category is thin for a given property, the entry says so plainly and moves on. The same five headings appear on every page, in the same order, so a reader always knows where they are.
Why entries carry no prices, no availability and no star-ranking of our own
The guide publishes no prices of any kind. Rates change with the season, the day and the channel, and a number printed in a guide is outdated the moment it is old. The property's own listing page carries the current figure, and the guide defers to it completely.
Availability is handled the same way. A guide that shows a calendar of free rooms is making a promise it cannot keep, because it does not hold inventory and does not take bookings. The entry ends at the official listing, where the dates live.
The star classes shown on the cards are the ones the property is publicly listed under. The guide does not apply a second layer of stars of its own, and it does not invent a rating where none exists. A star class is a classification, not a verdict, and the entry treats it as one.
The result is a reference that can stay stable. Entries do not need nightly updating, they do not go stale when a rate changes, and a reader never has to wonder which version of a number they are looking at.
Where the photography comes from, and what it does and does not show
The photographs on the cards come from the property's own public image set, the same set the official listing uses to show the building and its grounds. They are not shot by the guide, and they are not staged for it.
A photograph shows a property at one moment, in one season, from one angle. It does not show every room, every hour, or the state of the building on the day you happen to visit. The entry beside the image is the description; the image is the illustration.
Where a page needs more images than the inventory allows, the page is built with fewer, larger frames rather than with placeholders. An empty box is not a photograph, and this site does not use one.
If a detail matters to your visit, the listing page's own gallery is the full record. The guide's single image per entry is a representative frame, and it is labelled as one.
How to use the listing links, and why the official page is always the authority
Each card in the catalog ends with a single link, labelled See the Property, that opens the property's own official listing page in a new tab. That is the only outbound link on the site, and it is the point of the entry: the guide describes, the listing confirms.
The official page is the authority because it is the one that can be current. It carries the live dates, the current room categories, the up-to-date amenities and the property's own rules. The guide's description is written once and kept steady; the listing is maintained by the property itself.
If the two ever disagree, the listing wins. That is not a limitation of the guide; it is the division of labour. The guide's job is to make a property worth understanding, and the listing's job is to make it bookable.
Nothing on the guide is a step toward a booking, and nothing on the guide is a substitute for the listing. The link is a hand-off, not a shortcut, and the reader is expected to land on the property's own page and read it there.