I write the luxury travel advice I wish someone had given me.
I am Jack Williamson, and Luxury Hotel Compare is mine. I am not a hotel critic with an expense account. I am someone who has travelled a lot, saved hard for a handful of genuinely special stays, and learned most of the useful things the slow way: booking the wrong room category, arriving in the wrong month, paying cash when points would have done it.
This site exists so you do not have to learn it that way. Ranked hotel guides, honest comparisons, the right week to travel, the lounge and data and luggage decisions that quietly make a trip better, all written in plain language and always labelled as either first-hand or researched.
- Written by
- One person. Jack Williamson, Sydney.
- What it covers
- Luxury hotels and resorts, destination timing and weather, points and rewards, lounges, eSIMs and travel gear.
- How it is funded
- Affiliate commissions, disclosed on every page. You pay the same price. No paid placements.
- Press trips accepted
- None.
- Contact
- Contact page
Luxury travel content is mostly written for people who are not paying for it.
The gap that bothered me was never between good hotels and bad ones. It was between how a property reads online and how it feels when you walk in having spent real money to get there. Glossy write-ups skip the things that decide your week: that the entry-level room faces the service road, that the beach is a fifteen minute buggy ride, that the season you booked is the one everyone local avoids.
I started Luxury Hotel Compare because I kept making notes for friends who were planning one big trip and did not want to get it wrong. Those notes were specific, occasionally unflattering, and far more useful than anything I could find published. That is the standard for every page here.
I do not pretend to have slept in every hotel on this site. Nobody has, and claiming it is the fastest way to lose your trust. What I do is tell you exactly where my knowledge comes from, compare properties against the ones I genuinely know, and keep the pricing and the practical detail current enough to book from.
The whole trip, not just the room.
Where to stay
Ranked hotel and resort guides across the Maldives, Bali, Santorini, Kyoto, Dubai, Amalfi, Hawaii, Lisbon, Rome, Mexico City and more, with head-to-head comparisons when two properties are genuinely close.
Browse destinations →When to go
Month-by-month weather, shoulder-season pricing, monsoon and cyclone timing, and the specific weeks where the same room costs half as much for a marginal weather trade.
Read the guides →How to travel better
Points and reward strategies, airport lounge access, travel eSIMs and data, and the luggage and accessories actually worth the money once you have used them more than twice.
See travel essentials →How a hotel earns its place.
Experience where I have it
I have had a small number of genuinely great luxury stays, and a lot of ordinary travel around them. Where I have first-hand knowledge of a property or a destination, I tell you exactly what it was like. Where I do not, I say so rather than dressing up research as memory.
Research the rest properly
Room categories, rate history, renovation dates, seasonality, transfer times and what recent guests consistently complain about. I read the patterns, not the outliers, and I compare each property against ones I do know first-hand.
Five criteria, weighted equally
Room or villa quality, food, location or house reef, service, and value at the price being asked. No composite score hides a weak category. If a hotel is beautiful and badly run, the guide says both.
Price context, not price hype
A resort at 900 dollars a night and the same resort at 1,900 are different recommendations. Guides show live rates through Booking.com so you are comparing what you would actually pay, in the season you would actually travel.
Dated and re-verified
Every guide carries a last-verified date. Destination guides get a full annual pass and immediate updates when something material changes: a renovation, a rebrand, a closure, a management switch.
Nothing is for sale
No paid placements, no press trips, no gifted stays for coverage. Affiliate commissions fund the site, they are disclosed on every page, and they have never decided an order.
The masthead.
Three things that never change, page to page.
Independently funded
Affiliate commissions pay for this site. You pay the same price either way, and no hotel can buy its way into a guide or out of a criticism.
Honest about what I know
First-hand where I have stayed, carefully researched where I have not, and always labelled so you can weigh the recommendation properly.
Useful before it is glamorous
The right week to travel, the right room category, the lounge that saves a four-hour layover. Detail beats adjectives every time.
Questions people ask me
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I do. My name is Jack Williamson and I run Luxury Hotel Compare from Sydney, Australia. There is no anonymous content team behind this site. Every guide, comparison and destination page is written and edited by me, and my name is on it so you know who to hold responsible when something is wrong.
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No, and I would not trust anyone who claimed otherwise. I have had a handful of genuinely special luxury stays over the years, plus a lot of ordinary travel in between, and those stays taught me what actually matters: where the room sits in the building, how far the beach really is, whether breakfast is worth the supplement. For the properties I have not slept in, I research them properly, compare them against the ones I do know, and I say plainly which is which.
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I look at five things and weight them equally: room or villa quality, food, location or house reef, service, and value for the money actually being asked. Then I ask a simpler question: would I tell a friend to book this at this price? If the answer is no, it does not go in, no matter how famous the name on the door is.
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Affiliate commissions. If you book through a link here, the hotel or partner pays me a small percentage and you pay exactly the same price you would have paid anyway. Current partners include Booking.com via Commission Junction, Priority Pass and Airalo. No hotel can pay to be included, to be ranked higher, or to have criticism removed.
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No. I do not accept free nights, upgrades or hosted trips in exchange for coverage. Where I have booked something on a discounted industry rate, I say so on the page it appears on.
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Every guide carries a dated last-verified line. I re-check pricing, room categories and property status through the year and do a full pass on each destination guide annually, plus immediate updates when something material changes, such as a renovation, a rebrand or a closure.
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The parts of a trip that quietly decide how good it feels: when to travel and what the weather is actually doing then, airport lounge access, eSIM and roaming data, luggage and travel accessories worth owning, points and reward strategies, and the small logistical things nobody tells you until you have already made the mistake.
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Use the contact page. Corrections are welcome and get acted on. Several properties have been re-rated or removed because a reader emailed me before I could get back there myself.