How We Choose Hotels
Every hotel on this site is here for a reason we can state out loud. This page is that reason, written down once.
The selection rule
A hotel appears on a page only if we can answer one question about it: why this hotel, on this page? If the honest answer is that it exists and is nearby, it does not go on the page. Orlando has hundreds of hotels and most of them are interchangeable with several others within a mile.
Concretely, a hotel earns a place for at least one of these:
- A room configuration that solves a real problem, such as an officially published occupancy of five or six.
- A location that changes the shape of a day, such as a walking path to a park entrance.
- An official park benefit that is worth money.
- A facility that can hold a family for a whole day, such as a lazy river or a water park.
- A price position that is genuinely lower than the alternatives without giving up something essential.
- Included food that changes the weekly total, such as a hot breakfast and an evening meal.
What we publish
- Structural facts. Which parks a hotel serves, whether it is an official park hotel, how you reach the gates, what the published room occupancy is.
- Guest scores with their review count, and only where the underlying property data has enough reviews to mean something. A score without a count is not information.
- Trade-offs. Every recommendation on this site names what you give up.
- A checked date. The date the hotel details behind a page were reviewed appears on the page.
What we deliberately do not publish
Some of the most requested numbers in Orlando hotel research are also the ones that change fastest. Publishing a figure that was true last month makes a page look precise and be wrong, so these are absent by design:
- Nightly rates.
- Resort fee and parking fee amounts.
- Shuttle timetables and departure frequencies.
- Pet policies, weight limits and pet fees.
- Drive times and walking times between specific points.
Where one of these matters to a decision, the page says so and tells you to confirm it with the hotel or the park. That is less satisfying than a number and considerably more useful than a wrong one.
Distances are not travel times
Booking sites publish straight-line distances. A hotel listed as two miles from Disney is two miles in a straight line to some point on a very large property, which is neither a drive time nor a walking distance. We do not republish those figures as if they were.
Where the facts come from
- Official sources first. The hotel's own site, and the official Walt Disney World, Universal Orlando and SeaWorld Orlando sites for anything about park benefits.
- Property data for guest scores, review counts and star classification, always shown together and always with a checked date.
- Map and route data for location, never republished as a travel time.
Where two sources disagree, we do not publish the claim. If a booking page says parking is free and the hotel's own site lists a charge, the honest output is a note telling you to check, not a guess.
What we do not claim
No editor on this site claims to have stayed somewhere they have not stayed. You will not find sentences here about how much we loved the pool, because that kind of writing is easy to produce and impossible for you to verify.
What you will find instead is what a property has, who it suits, and what it costs you elsewhere in the trip.
How the commercial side works
We earn a commission when you book through the links on this site. That is how it is funded and we would rather say so plainly than bury it.
What that does not change is the selection. A hotel does not get a better position, a better label or a place on a page because it pays more. Every selection on this site is written with a stated reason, which means it is checkable: if the reason does not hold up, the placement is wrong and we would rather hear about it.
The full disclosure is on the affiliate disclosure page.
What is still missing
This is a launch. Several pages that would obviously belong on a site like this are not published yet, because they depend on per-hotel data we could not verify to the standard above. That includes pages on resort fees, free parking, pet policies, connecting rooms and bunk beds.
They will appear when the underlying facts have been checked against official sources, and not before.
Hotel details and the guest scores on this page were checked in August 2026.
Common questions
Do you rank Orlando hotels from best to worst?
No. A single ranking would be wrong for most readers most of the time, because the best hotel for a Universal couple is a poor choice for a Disney family of six. Every page names the traveler each selection is for.
Why do some hotels have no guest score on this site?
Either the property data behind the page does not carry enough reviews for the score to mean anything, or the hotel is new, or the figures looked unreliable. In all three cases we would rather show nothing than a number we do not trust.
Can a hotel pay to be featured?
No.
How often is this site updated?
Park benefits, fees and shuttle arrangements change often enough that they need checking every few months, and guest scores every six. Each page shows the date its hotel details were last checked.
