Eli5: what gives a hotel a 5 star ranking? What can a hotel do to improve to a 4 or 5 star hotel and what does a 5 or 4 star hotel have that others don’t?

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Answer 1

Most things have been mentioned so far. From the very lowest you add things like a coffee maker in your room, bottled water, a fridge, hairdryer etc. As you go up you get more amenities like a pool, gym, spa, nice restaurant etc. The services also increase, you start out by adding a 24h reception, dry cleaning, porters etc.

Many of the features of a higher star rating I believe are largely unnoticed by regular tourists, the stars don’t necessarily correlate with quality as you’d expect. There are some really lovely 2 star places, usually small, very little service (with narrow check in times, front door locked at night etc). There are very mediocre quality 4 star hotels designed to cater to business – the hotel can provide a lot of services such as arranging hire cars, conference rooms, same day drycleaning, airport transport etc. My last 4 star Hotel was for business, it was nothing special in quality but they had parcel postage and letter forwarding included in the price, as an example. They also arranged for a hire van and went to collect it and parked it at the hotel for me. I checked in at 2am without issue and they still had people available to help with luggage to the room at that time.