How to choose a hotel in five minutes
The booking sites show you 500 options. You need one. Here's the method we use for every city.
By Carlos de Ory · Updated 15 October 2026 · 3 min read
Most people spend more time choosing a hotel than choosing the city. You open a booking site, see hundreds of options, sort by price, then by rating, open twenty tabs, and an hour later you book the one you saw first. The problem isn't a lack of choice. It's too much of it.
This is the five-minute method we use to pick three hotels in every city on Top3Hotels. It works just as well for your own trips.
1. Decide your level before you look
Before you see a single photo, decide which of three trips this is:
- Budget: you just need a clean private room with its own bathroom in a safe, practical spot. You'll be out all day.
- Best value: you want a place you'll actually enjoy, with great reviews, at a normal price for the city.
- Luxury: the hotel is part of the trip. An anniversary, a treat, a 'once a year'.
This one decision removes about 80% of the listings. It's also why we show exactly one hotel at each level, not a long list.
2. Pick the area, then the hotel
A great hotel in the wrong place ruins a city break. Find the one or two neighbourhoods that match your trip (first visit, nightlife, food, quiet, near the station), then only look at hotels there. In small cities (Odense, Bruges, Salzburg) this barely matters; in big ones (London, Paris, Hamburg) it matters more than anything else.
3. Read the score and the number of reviews together
A 9.6 from 12 reviews tells you very little. An 8.6 from 2,000 reviews tells you a lot. Our rule of thumb:
- Under 100 reviews: treat the score as a hint, not a fact.
- Several hundred reviews and 8.5+: you can trust it.
- Thousands of reviews and 8.0+: a very safe bet, even if it isn't exciting.
4. Read three bad reviews, not thirty good ones
Sort by the lowest scores and read the three most recent. You're looking for patterns that would bother you: noise, small rooms, a broken lift, a building site next door. A complaint about the breakfast doesn't matter if you never eat breakfast.
5. Compare the real total
The headline price is rarely what you pay. Add breakfast, parking and city tax, and check the cancellation terms. A room that's €15 cheaper but non-refundable isn't always the better deal.
6. Book, and stop looking
Once a hotel passes all five steps, book it. Prices on good hotels in good areas tend to go up, not down, as the dates get closer.
Or skip the five minutes
That's exactly what Top3Hotels does for you: in every city we compare the well-reviewed hotels on the same dates and keep three, the best budget room, the best value and the best luxury hotel. Pick a city and you'll see them in one screen. Read the full method, or see which cities have the cheapest five-star hotels in Europe.
Booking links are affiliate links: if you book, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It never decides which hotels we pick. How we make money.