This year’s list of America’s top 25 hotels is just out, as ranked by the travel information site TripAdvisor. It features hotels, inns and resorts from sea to shining sea: Nantucket in Massachusetts to Hawaii’s Big Island, the Colorado Rockies to California wine country and Miami Beach.
Number 1 on the list: the Langham Chicago, debuting in its first year of eligibility (it opened in 2013). The luxury Langham has pride of place on the Chicago River, in a building designed by the iconic architect Mies van der Rohe and on the National Register of Historic Places.
Chicago boasts three of the top 25 hotels in the survey, the most of any city, while California tops the states with five hotels on the list.
The list, called the Travelers’ Choice Awards, is now in its 13th year. It's based on reviews and opinions collected in 2014 from among more than 890,000 reviewed hotels, B&Bs and specialty lodgings on TripAdvisor sites worldwide. 8 of the 25 hotels are receiving Travelers' Choice Awards for the first time.
"We have tremendous scale of content on the site," says TripAdvisor spokesperson Kevin Carter. "Much like polling, the bigger the sample, the better the results." Worldwide, TripAdvisor rates some 4.4 million attractions, lodgings and restaurants.
The Langham Chicago's managing director, Robert Schofield, calls the top ranking "absolutely brilliant" and "an absolute honor."
TripAdvisor says the primary criteria are "remarkable service, quality and value." Although the TripAdvisor covers hotels in all budget categories, most in this survey are luxury properties.
With any survey based on user generated content, I worry about hotel operators gaming the system by offering freebies or discounts in exchange for favorable reviews, but Carter assures me it doesn't happen. "Every single review goes through our tracking system, and we map the how, what, where and when of each review," he says, citing "sophisticated systems and teams in place to detect fraudsters” and “strong penalties in place to deter them."
"When we ask our travelers how they found TripAdvisor reviews, 95 percent say the reviews accurately reflected the trip they took," he says.
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