How we choose and rank
How We Choose Cornwall Accommodation
Every place to stay on this site — hotels, B&Bs, guest houses, cabins, cottages, holiday and caravan parks, glamping sites and more — is hand-picked by our editorial team first. Only then is the guide ordered by Google review score, and nothing else moves a place up or down. Last updated October 2026.
Stage one — the hand-pick
Every place is hand-picked first
No place lands in a guide on a score alone. Every single one — hotels, B&Bs, guest houses, cabins, cottages, holiday and caravan parks, glamping sites and more — is chosen by name by our editors before any ranking happens.
Think of it as two doors. Our team decides who gets through the first one. Only then does a score decide where they stand. Google review scores sort the places we have already chosen; they never do the choosing.
What earns a place its spot
Somewhere we’d send a friend — If we would not happily point a friend arriving next weekend at it, it does not go in. Our name is on this page too.
Right for the guide it’s in — A family guide gets places that genuinely work for families. A dog-friendly guide gets places that genuinely love dogs. We pick for each guide, not once for all of them.
Enough guest feedback to stand on — We look for a real body of guest experience behind a place, not a handful of reviews — so the score it later ranks on actually means something.
Nobody can buy their way in — A place cannot pay to be picked, and it cannot pay for a position once it is in. We have never sold either, and we are not about to.
Stage two — the order
How we rank the places we have picked
Once a place is in a guide, one thing decides where it sits: the star rating guests have given it on Google. We do not score places ourselves. Nobody here can nudge a favourite up a list — there is no button for it.
On a place’s own page the rating is fetched from Google as the page is built, so a score that moves on Google moves here too. In the guides we use the figure from the most recent sync, and if Google is briefly unreachable we show the last figure we have rather than a blank — never a guess of our own.
Hotels, parks, cottages and the rest
The same method for every kind of stay
Hotels, B&Bs, guest houses, cabins, cottages, holiday parks, caravan parks and glamping sites are all hand-picked the same way, then ranked by exactly the same method: highest Google review score first, review count breaking any tie, no paid placement. No separate scale for one kind of stay. No category quietly judged more generously than another.
And we only ever compare like with like. A holiday park and a luxury hotel are not competing for the same position, because they never appear in the same list.
The guides these standards cover
Being straight with you
What gets left out
Not everything in Cornwall makes it onto this site, and a guide that pretended otherwise would be worth less to you. So here is what you will not find, and why.
Places with no Google reviews — A place we have picked but which carries no Google rating yet has nothing to rank it on, so it cannot hold a position in a ranked guide. That is not a judgement on the place — we simply have no evidence to put it above or below anyone else.
Anything outside Cornwall — We cover Cornwall and nowhere else. A superb hotel or cottage over the Tamar is still in Devon, and it will not appear here.
Everything that would make this a directory — Our guides are shortlists, not inventories. They hold a small number of places per category rather than everything that exists — so if somewhere is missing, it almost certainly has not been turned down. It just has not been added yet.
Paid inclusion — We turn down requests to buy a listing or a higher position. Some booking links earn us a commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you. That is what funds the site, and it changes nothing about the order you see.
Keeping it current
How often listings are reviewed
Ratings and review counts are re-synced from Google automatically, and every listing carries a “Last reviewed” badge showing the month its figures last came in. That date is read from the sync itself rather than typed by anyone, so it moves on its own — and a listing that has never been synced shows no date at all, rather than one nobody can stand behind.
Because a guide’s order follows those scores, a re-sync can re-order a guide. If a place slips below another on Google, it slips below it here too, with nobody deciding anything.
Most recently re-checked
- Carbis Bay Hotel & SpaLast reviewed: October 2026
- Harbour Hotel & Spa St IvesLast reviewed: September 2026
- St Michaels Resort, FalmouthLast reviewed: September 2026
All 14 of our hand-picked places to stay currently carry a Google rating.
The people behind the guides
Who we are
The guides, destination pages and articles here are written by named people who live in Cornwall, or write about it full time — not an anonymous content desk. Every article carries its author’s name, and every author has a profile page listing everything they have written for us. If you want to know who is recommending a place to you, you can go and look.
Rob
Local Cornwall Writer & Editor
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Lisamarie Lamb
Cornwall Writer & Researcher
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Lydia Paleschi
Cornwall Travel & Adventure Writer
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Penelope Dale
Local Cornwall Travel Writer
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Paul Watts
Cornwall History & Folklore Author
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Lizzie Heather
Cornwall Copywriter & Local
View profile →You can see all of them on our authors page, alongside the contributors who have written for the site.
Think we’ve got something wrong?
If a listing is out of date, a place has closed, or you reckon a guide has missed somewhere obvious, tell us — we will look at it properly. Corrections are free, and asking for one will never cost a place its position.
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