Stars, diamonds and other rating systems have more to do with a hotel's facilities and amenities than they do with quality, as anoyone who's ever been disappointed in a five-star hotel can tell you. Online hotel reviews can help, especially when they're written by ordinary travelers, but combing through them to find a nice hotel, in the right area and at the right price is time-consuming. We know, because we can spend hours researching just the right hotel for our travels.
We've done the homework for you, spending hours combing through information and ratings about San Diego hotels to come up with the few best hotels in each category of location and price, all of them places that we would stay in ourselves. Every hotel that we recommend has to pass one or more of these tests:
- Low to moderately high priced hotels must earn a user rating of at least 3.5 (out of 5) at Tripadvisor.
- High-priced hotels must earn a user rating of at least 4.0 at Tripadvisor.
- We stayed there personally and found it to be clean, comfortable and a good value for the price.
- We may relax these standards by half a point for special types of properties such as bed and breakfasts.
- When all other factors are equal (overall rating, price, location, type of property), we figure cleaner is better and recommend the properties with the highest cleanliness ratings.
- Properties that meet all of our standards but rank slightly lower for cleanliness become our "Runners Up." Try them if our recommended properties are full.
About the San Diego Hotel Lists
Rather than force you to sort through endless pages of hotel profiles trying to figure out which one is best, we've done the work for you. Our lists of the best hotels take into account visitor ratings and cleanliness, as well as value for money.We're sure there are plenty of perfectly acceptable San Diego hotels that did not make it onto our list. We've tried to narrow down that list of "acceptable" places into a short list of hotels that are clean, well-liked by people who stay there and good value for your money. If you're looking for a specific hotel and can't find it in the alphabetical listings, it does not meet our criteria.
If you don't want to take the time to go over our hotel listings to find a place to stay, try our other time- and money-saving strategies.
