How we rank

We publish the method behind our ranking and our review scores instead of calling it proprietary. This page states it in full: how a hostel's position is decided, and how a review counts toward its score.

Scores weight toward recent stays and are pulled toward the area average until a hostel has enough recent evidence of its own.

  1. No hostel can pay for a higher position.
  2. Recent stays count more than old ones.
  3. A hostel with only a few reviews starts close to its area's average.

Ranking method

No hostel can pay for a higher position. Rank depends only on the reviews and information on record for a property, never on whether it holds a partner tier. A partner tier buys things like a badge, a direct booking exit and owner tools; it never buys rank, listing presence or a place in results.

A hostel's displayed score starts pulled toward the average score for its area, and moves away from that average as its own recent reviews build up. A property with only a few recent reviews sits partway toward its area's average; one with a broader base of recent reviews sits mostly on its own record. The weight behind that shift is a weighted count of recent reviews, not a simple count of every review a property has ever received. A handful of recent reviews moves a score a little, and a few dozen moves it most of the way to standing on its own.

Every review that passes our checks counts toward a score. Nothing is filtered from view: our approval checks decide whether a review earns its writer a reward, never whether a reader gets to see it. A reward-code badge, given when a review is tied to a redeemed reward code, is the only signal on the page that a review comes from a confirmed stay; an unbadged review is one we have not confirmed that way. The stay month attached to a review is the guest's own statement, not something we verify independently.

Review count is never the default sort, and a minimum number of reviews is never a default filter. Both would bury exactly the low-review properties that pulling thin scores toward the area average exists to rank fairly. The one count where a hostel's listing changes is zero: a property with no reviews yet shows "No reviews yet" in muted grey, in the space its score would otherwise occupy. At any other count, a hostel shows a full score, no provisional label and no note about it having too few reviews.

Scoring method

A review's weight in a score decays over time, on a clock that runs from the month the guest says they stayed, never from the date they wrote the review, so a review written late about an old stay is weighted as an old review.

  1. A stay from this month counts 100%.
  2. A stay from a year ago counts 50%.
  3. A stay from two years ago counts 25%.

Hostelworld, for comparison

Hostelworld's review count is lifetime and never decays, but its displayed score recomputes daily from only the past six months of reviews, falling back to twelve then twenty-four months only where the shorter window holds no rating, even though the reviews themselves stay visible for up to three years (source: Hostelworld's help centre, "How long does a review stay on my page?", read 16 August 2026). A hostel with a small recent base can look thin there next to one with a large lifetime count.