What’s in a star? That depends on the hotel rating service

If you’ve watched any television recently, you may have seen one of the Hotels.com ads in which a fleet of black SUVs roars into a hotel parking lot and disgorges hip-looking guys and gals wearing black shirts emblazoned with “Hotels.com” while the song “The Power” booms in the background.

Ostensibly they are checking out the hotel for you. The ads are very MTV-like and, admittedly, fun. But how accurate is this scenario?

Not surprisingly, “evaluators,” as Hotels.com calls those charged with visiting hotels listed on its site, don’t wear all black or drive black SUVs.

But what exactly those evaluators do is more difficult to discern. Hotels.com, which awards star ratings of one to five, will not say how many evaluators it employs, only that it employs them. Nor will it say how many of the 20,000 hotels listed on its site are rated, how often they are checked and what is evaluated.

“For competitive reasons we don’t talk about that,” said Carl Minto-Sparks, senior vice president of marketing for Hotels.com, saying only that they visit “thousands of properties that represent 80% of our business.”

That is 80% of its business, not 80% of the hotels on the site. He declined to specify the number of hotels inspected.

The issue of hotel ratings is a complex one for Internet travelers. Every website is free to create its own rating systems, and those rankings will vary. For example, a four-star hotel on Orbitz may be a three-star on Hotels.com.

Some websites simply adopt the star rating that a property gives itself. Others, including Hotels.com, Expedia and Orbitz, employ a formula that integrates on-site evaluations with consumer feedback and a set of standards; for example, a four-star hotel would have room service. Many sites post a definition of what their stars mean, and it’s worth seeing whether it matches your expectations.

Travelocity pulls itself out of the ratings game altogether. It posts consumer feedback and also contracts with the AAA for its diamond rating system.

As hotel evaluators go, AAA is among the most seasoned organizations. It has been in the business of rating hotel quality since 1937 and employs 65 full-time inspectors who visit the 33,000 North American and Caribbean properties in its listings every year, AAA says.

It introduced its diamond ratings in 1976 and posts the details of how they are earned in its tour books and on its website www.aaa-calif.com/travel/agency/accomrating.asp. With a little work, consumers can see just what goes into the ratings.

“We have substance behind our rating systems,” said Michael Petrone, director of AAA’s tourism information development.

Besides on Travelocity, the ratings are available to AAA members in guidebooks, online at www.aaa.com and are licensed to other suppliers of travel information.

The upside of website ratings is the downside of printed guidebooks: Websites can be changed; printed material can’t. Consumers may pick up an old guidebook at a garage sale or thrift store and assume that a hotel’s rating is still the same.

Websites that can be updated quickly have an advantage over guidebooks, said David Dennis, a spokesman for Expedia. Adjustments can be made to listings as soon as there is a substantive change, such as construction or storm damage. (AAA updates its Web listings on a case-by-case basis when it learns of such changes, said AAA spokeswoman Janie Graziani.)

And there are no outdated Web pages lying around at garage sales.

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Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.