StaySane · the lodging half of PlaneSane
A hotel risk score, not a star rating.
PlaneSane answers “will this flight actually work out?” StaySane answers the same question for where you sleep. It cuts past the marketing — stars and price — to the risks that actually ruin a trip: a dirty room, a noisy night, a bad location, an overpaid rate.
The StaySane Score
One number from 0 to 100 — higher means fewer red flags — built from four things, weighted, and shown to you in the open.
It scores the stay, not the street. We don’t rate neighbourhood safety — there’s no reliable global source for it, so we don’t guess. A high score means guests reported few problems with the room, the sleep, the service and the value; it is not a claim about the area around the hotel. Where guests themselves raise safety, that shows up in the review breakdown as their words, not our verdict.
Quality & cleanliness
Guest-review sentiment by category — a cleanliness, noise, or room-condition problem shows even when the star average looks fine. Complaints in several categories compound rather than being averaged away.
Location & access
Google's location, transit, and airport-access ratings, plus how far out the hotel actually is from where you're headed.
Trust
How much of a track record the listing has — review volume above all, then property class and amenity breadth. Neighborhood safety we deliberately don't guess, though we do read what guests say about it.
Price fairnessNot scored
The nightly rate against local peers of similar quality. Shown, but NOT part of the risk score: a room can be cheap precisely because of things we can't see, and a risk score that rewards cheapness would recommend exactly those.
Why a star average lies
A hotel can hold a respectable 3.9★ overall and still have a real problem hiding in the reviews — say, 73% of the comments about the bathrooms are negative. The star average blends that away. StaySane reads the guest-review sentiment by category — cleanliness, sleep/noise, service, bathrooms — and lets a concentrated complaint pull the score down, because that’s the thing you’ll actually remember.
On every hotel page you see the breakdown that drove the score — the same transparency as the PlaneSane flight score. No black box.
When we don’t score it
If a hotel has too few guest reviews to trust, we withhold the score rather than publish a number we can’t stand behind — you still see the property and its details, just not a false-confidence rating. Same for neighborhood safety: there’s no reliable global dataset, so we don’t pretend to score it. It’s the same “we’ll tell you when we can’t tell” honesty as the flight side.
Where the data comes from
Catalog, guest-rating sentiment, location sub-ratings, and nightly prices come from live hotel search data. We score hotels — we don’t sell rooms. When you book, we hand you off to the booking site, and we may earn an affiliate commission — but that never changes your price and never touches the score. A hotel can’t pay its way up. See our editorial standards.