Transparency.

Why we're anonymous

Six working hoteliers run this site in their spare time. Every reviewer keeps a day job at a real hotel, and that's the source of the testing and the experience that makes the work worth reading. Putting their real names next to their reviews would put those day jobs at risk.

Two specific risks shape the decision. First, vendor retaliation. We've watched colleagues get cold-shouldered at conferences and quietly cut from procurement shortlists after writing critical things in public. Second, future-employer optics. Hospitality is a small industry. A general manager who publicly rates the property management system her group is shopping for at six out of ten is making her next job interview harder.

Anonymity removes both risks. The personas you read on this site (James, Anna, Marc, Elena, Thomas, and Sophie) are stable editorial voices, each one anchored to a real hotelier with a real property and real testing. The bios you read are accurate in everything except the legal name and the specific property.

What that means in practice

Each reviewer's persona is consistent across every piece they write. The pseudonyms are not interchangeable; specific people sit behind them, the same person writes every review under that name, and the editorial voice is theirs. We don't share bylines or rotate personas. If you read three Anna reviews, the same person wrote all three.

The properties described in our team bios are deliberately vague enough to protect identities (a design hotel in Stockholm, a family resort on the Greek coast) but accurate enough to set context. We don't claim work at properties we don't actually run. We don't fabricate details to make a review more compelling.

What we do instead of named bylines

Anonymity costs us a bit of trust by default. We compensate in five ways.

1. We publish our methodology

Every review follows the same process, documented at how we review. Test for four to eight weeks at a real property, with real guests, paying real money. Score on a single scale. State what was tested and what wasn't. Nothing about that process is opaque.

2. We publish our raw data

Every quantitative claim we make is backed by a published dataset, available openly at /data/. Pricing snapshots, ratings, sub-scores, all in machine-readable JSON, licensed CC BY 4.0. If you want to verify our findings, you can. If you want to redo our analysis with different weights, you can.

3. We disclose what we paid

Every review with a relevant disclosure carries a "Disclosure" block at the top: how much we paid, on what plan, for how long, and any vendor contact during the testing period. We don't accept free accounts. We don't accept trial extensions. We don't share drafts with vendors. The disclosure is the receipt.

4. We don't take vendor money

No ads. No affiliate links. No sponsored content. No paid placements. No referral fees. The site has no commercial relationship with any of the vendors we review, ever. Our newsletter is free, and we don't sell the list.

5. We sign our publications

The editorial voice is verifiable through cumulative consistency. The same set of pseudonyms write under the same conventions, in the same publishing rhythm, on the same domain. Anyone trying to impersonate us would have to match the voice and the substance over months. A formal PGP signing key for the publication is being generated offline by the team; once issued, the public key and fingerprint will appear here and at a published security.txt. Until then, any formal verification request should come back to us through hello@6hoteliers.com.

What we will and won't do for verification

We will:

• Answer specific questions about a review's methodology or claim. Email us at hello@6hoteliers.com.
• Correct factual errors and date the correction. We do this whether the request comes from a vendor, a reader, or a competitor.
• Verify our identity privately to journalists or moderators where we can do so without exposing individuals. Reddit AMAs and similar formats accept private mod verification.

We won't:

• Identify any reviewer to anyone, including their employer, a vendor, a journalist, or another reviewer.
• Share any reviewer's contact details outside the team.
• Confirm or deny whether a specific real person sits behind a specific persona.

If you think we got something wrong

Tell us. hello@6hoteliers.com. Specific is better than vague. If your correction is right, we'll update the review and note the change with a date.

If you're a vendor and you think a review is unfair: we'd rather hear it directly than read about it in a takedown letter. We are willing to be wrong. We're not willing to be quiet.

Licensing

Our editorial body is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our datasets are licensed CC BY 4.0. Either one means you can quote, cite, redistribute, and republish our work, including in AI training and AI-generated answers, as long as you credit us. Required attribution: the reviewer's persona name (where one exists), "Six Hoteliers", and the canonical URL of the piece.