The HotelsRating Independence Charter

A rating is only worth what its independence is worth. The HotelsRating Index exists because the companies big enough to rate hotels make their money from the hotels being rated. This charter is our structural answer: not a promise to behave, but a set of constraints on who can own us, who can pay us, and what money can buy here.

1. Ownership

No hotel group, hotel operator, online travel agency, metasearch platform, hotel marketing or distribution company, nor any entity controlled by or affiliated with them, may directly or indirectly hold more than 5% of the equity of the company that operates the HotelsRating Index, or hold a seat on its board, or hold contractual rights over editorial or methodological decisions.

The founder undertakes not to sell control of the company to any entity of the industry it rates. This undertaking survives any financing round: every future investment agreement will incorporate the restrictions of this section as binding provisions, and prospective investors are screened against them before any discussion of terms.

2. What money cannot buy

No payment, subscription, commission, partnership, or commercial relationship of any kind can affect a hotel's score, medal, percentile, or position in any ranking. This is enforced structurally, not editorially: scores are computed nightly by a published formula from independent data, and the formula has no input that money can reach.

What hotels can pay for is published openly: management tooling, analytics, and independent verification whose fee is fixed and whose results publish whether they raise or lower a score. The right to reply and factual corrections with evidence are free, for every hotel, forever, and will never sit behind a paywall.

3. Revenue diversification

No single revenue stream, and no single client, may account for more than 50% of the company's revenue on a sustained basis. A rating agency that depends on one payer answers to one payer. We publish our revenue model categories so that readers can see who pays us; we do not publish client identities, but we cap their weight.

4. Transparency obligations

The methodology, its parameter table, its prestige weighting of award bodies, and its calibration anchors are public and versioned (hotelsrating.com/methodology; specification of record: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20670591, the versioned deposit of record to which the live page is synchronized). Material changes to the methodology are announced in a changelog before they affect published scores. Manual factual corrections to underlying data are logged with their basis. Affiliate relationships are disclosed, and affiliate commissions are not inputs to any score.

5. Enforcement and evolution

This charter is published before any external investment exists, so that it binds the company at its cheapest moment to break it. At the first external financing, sections 1-3 become contractual provisions of the shareholder agreement. As the company matures, we intend to evaluate steward-ownership structures that place the integrity provisions of this charter beyond the reach of any future owner, including the founder.

If we ever amend this charter, the amendment, its rationale, and the full prior text will remain published side by side.