Methodology

What this is

EMPTYJET Hotel Intelligence is the editorial hotel catalogue of EMPTYJET, a private-jet charter company. It exists because our flight planners kept answering the same question — “which hotels are actually worth the flight?” — from notes, and because no public list we found separates properties with real, repeated recognition from those that simply describe themselves as luxury.

The catalogue currently holds 5,640 published hotels in 137 countries. It is not a booking site: we do not sell rooms, take commissions from hotels, or accept paid placement. Hotels cannot pay to be listed or to move up.

The three EMPTYJET levels

Every hotel starts as a candidate on a master list compiled from independent references — award lists, guide shortlists, brand and affiliation directories, card-programme inventories and travel publications. Each candidate is scored on how many independent families of references recognise it, how authoritative those references are, and whether there is explicit evidence against a luxury standard. The score produces one public designation and a rank:

• EMPTYJET Preferred — Top band of the EMPTYJET ranking: strongest multi-source evidence of a true luxury standard. The properties we fly clients to most often.
• EMPTYJET Recommend — Second band: well-established luxury properties with consistent evidence across independent references.
• EMPTYJET Approved — Third band: properties that pass the EMPTYJET luxury gate but with fewer or narrower references. Still a deliberate selection, not a directory.

The default order on every list on this site, “EMPTYJET ranking”, is that rank. Internal scores, confidence notes and working statuses are not published; only the level and the rank are.

What “verified” means

Being on the master list does not make a hotel publishable. A property is published only after its identity has been confirmed (official website reachable and matching the name), its location has been established, and its facts have been collected from named sources. Each public fact is stored with the source it came from and the date we checked it; hotel pages show a “Verified” date per section and list the sources used under “Sources”.

We distinguish three kinds of facts. Verified facts were read from an authoritative source (the hotel’s own site, the brand, an award issuer). Imported facts come from the EMPTYJET master selection itself — the name, the level, the rank, and the seed country and city — and are labelled as such where it matters. Anything inferred by software is kept internal and never shown as fact. Language models are used only to match records, classify text we have already collected, and draft original descriptions from a fact sheet; they are never a source of facts.

Where a section has no verified data, the section does not appear. A hotel page with no description, no amenities and no rate is a hotel we have not finished checking, not a hotel with nothing to say.

Data sources

Sources are ranked by authority: the official hotel site first, then the brand or affiliation, then places data, award issuers, open encyclopaedic data, and travel publications last, for support only.

• Official hotel websites — Primary source for name, address, phone, rooms, amenities, dining and spa facts, check-in times and policies.
• Brand and affiliation sites (Aman, Four Seasons, Mandarin Oriental, Leading Hotels of the World, Small Luxury Hotels, Relais & Châteaux, Preferred Hotels …) — Confirms brand or membership and fills identity facts when the property page is thin.
• Google Maps data (via a places provider) — Coordinates, formatted address, and the Google rating and review count, shown as “Google” with the date collected. Never merged with other ratings.
• Forbes Travel Guide, MICHELIN Guide, The World’s 50 Best, La Liste, Travel + Leisure World’s Best, Condé Nast Traveler Gold List — Awards and distinctions, shown only once matched to the issuer’s own published list and labelled with year and a source link.
• Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons — Historical facts (opening year, architect), identifiers, and openly licensed photographs with attribution.
• OurAirports — Airport reference data used to compute the nearest suitable airports to each hotel.
• Frankfurter (ECB reference rates) — Currency conversion for indicative rates.
• The EMPTYJET master selection — The starting list, the EMPTYJET level and the ranking. Kept private; only the public designation is shown.

We fetch pages politely (identified user agent, one request at a time per host, cached), respect robots directives, and do not scrape Google or booking sites directly.

Ratings

Each rating is shown with its source, scale, review count where applicable, and the date we collected it. We do not average ratings from different sources, we do not invent a composite score, and we do not mark up third-party ratings as our own. Official star classifications are shown only where a national or regional scheme exists and the classification could be confirmed; a hotel calling itself “five-star” is not enough.

Prices

A “typical nightly rate” is the median of public rates we observed for a standard double room over a rolling window of dates, with the observed range and the date last checked. We show it only when we hold recent observations. When we hold none — which is the case for most hotels while the catalogue is being built — the page says “Price on request”. We never estimate, extrapolate or copy a price from a third party. Rates vary by date and are always confirmed with the hotel.

Images and attribution

Photographs are used only where we have a right to: images supplied by or published on the hotel’s or brand’s official channels for press use, or openly licensed images (for example Wikimedia Commons) with the attribution and licence shown. Every image is checked to depict the property it is attached to. When we have no suitable image, the hotel gets a plain EMPTYJET placeholder — we do not use stock photography or photos of other properties.

Airports and flights

Nearest airports are computed from OurAirports reference data as straight-line distance from the hotel’s coordinates, with a rough transfer-time estimate. The “Fly to this hotel with EMPTYJET” button takes you to the EMPTYJET flight search for the primary airport; suitability for a given aircraft is confirmed during quoting.

Corrections

If you represent a hotel and something is wrong or out of date, or you are a traveller who has spotted an error, write to [email protected] with the hotel name and the page link. Corrections are checked against the official source before publication; we do not accept marketing copy or price claims without an observable public rate.

Catalogue last updated 20 Aug 2026 · Browse the catalogue