The Hotel by New Star Rating (Star Quality)

I have unconsciously been studying the World Hotel Ranking all my life, so much so that I think I have examined, compared and studied over one hundred different models, but none of them suited me.

None of them – IMHO – described actual hotel quality, none of them minimally listed real clients’ demands.
They were only an incredible heap of calculations in metres, centimetres or some other unit of measurement from other countries, as well as decorations having little to do with quality of service.

In other words, it was as if quality should go hand in hand with measurements or stuff like that, until one day I decided that something had to be done and, after many tests, there it is, finally.

I actually worked in some of the countries (in some cases for years) whose hotel ranking I have studied, firstly as a dish washer in Brazil in the Seventies.
As time went by I made it up to the top, managing hotel chains in every corner of the globe in all of the departments in this field, none excluded.
This has allowed me to come up with an analysis that thoroughly takes into account the tourist’s, and as a consequence the client’s, demands concerning every single quality detail.

But what is the Hotel Quality Rating (HQR)?
The idea is to award all of the hotels with ‘stars’ in a way that is uniform on a national and European level, according to objectives and shared criteria based on chain algorithm which will measure the thousandths (one thousand for each star) that will provide the final result.

The core of the whole project is a qualitative and not merely quantitative assessment, which however, as has been stated, remains pivotal for awarding the stars.
Every hotel manager will thus be able to produce a self-certification of the features of his/her own hotel by simply filling in a form that will be available online.
The form should be inserted onto the national website for tourism. As will be shown later on in this article, this will help to reduce the impact of reviews such as those coming from TripAdvisor, which are causing several problems for the whole accommodation industry and others.

Some personal research carried out – over 1,000 people interviewed – demonstrates what I was mentioning before.
The form will present several questions and, according to the concatenated answers, the hotel will acquire a certain amount of thousandths and be awarded with an adequate number of stars.

A team of examiners – made up of experts in the field certified by qualified institutions – will perform inspections at least every five years in order to check the honesty of the self-assessed data, while new accommodation structures will be visited within sixty days from their launch.
The first, most evident, goal is to have a self-certified check on the real conditions of detail of the level of service provided by the hotel sector.
This means having no random sample data, no superficial, quantitative data, but a far more meaningful, thorough and qualitative overall description.
Because QUALITY is the key word of the whole project: data quality, hotel quality, service quality, target client quality.

The long term result, in accordance with the pursuit of quality, is that of being able to obtain a picture of the national and European hotel sector that will be based on a differentiating, in-depth, objectively traceable focus on service quality.


Why am I writing this article in this language?
Simple, I am sharing it with those who want to read it in order to reach out to a larger audience, but above all I am writing it to prove once more that abroad they think in a different way.
I am also doing this because I have been proposing this idea for two years to the Italian tourist authorities and no one has ever even considered it worthy of consideration.

The only person who did have a look at it, though totally enthusiastic about it, told me that a long streak of bureaucratic procedures had to be followed and that, maybe, after a few years it could take off … which once more shows that Italian schedules are unbelievably slow.

On the contrary, while I was working abroad and helping to draft the planning of tourism together with the Ministers of those countries in my free time, within the space of only five minutes my ideas were standing on their legs and starting to run... and how they ran!