How we listen

A sound of place is anything that would still be happening if the hotel closed tomorrow. Water against rock, a river past an island, a rail corridor, a lake sheet moving in the cold, bells rung from a village campanile. We work out from the ground and the plan of the site, not from how a stay felt.

Each entry carries three separate blocks. The standing sound says what is there. What makes it names the physical source: falls, port, canal, forest, glacier, station, bell tower or bathing plant. What it covers says which parts of the surroundings sit under that layer and which come through it.

We never call a hotel loud, restless or hard to sleep in, and we never suggest asking for a different room. These are working businesses, and inventing a fault in one of them would be both unfair and useless. A sound is a property of the ground, and the entry stops at describing it.

There are no measurements on this site. No decibels, no comparisons between hotels, no scales and no imitation of sound in words. A description that cannot be supported by published material about the place does not go in, and neither does anything we could only know from staying there.

One thing to raise is a line of preparation. It suggests something worth asking the hotel before you travel: how a season changes the water, when a shared floor is busiest, how a road is handled in deep winter. It is written as a question for you to ask, never as a complaint about the place.

Last heard is the month in which we last opened the published material behind an entry. It is a note about our own reading, not a record of a visit, and it changes when we go back over the sources.

Material comes from published sources: the hotels' own sites and press material, architectural and geographical writing, and trade coverage. We do not publish accounts of staying anywhere, and we do not accept a stay in exchange for an entry.

We publish no prices, no star classifications, no ratings, no booking function and no paid placement. Nothing on the site is affiliate linked, and a hotel cannot pay to be added, moved or rewritten. Factual corrections are free and welcome, from readers and from the hotels themselves.

The guide includes a Casino Hotels section because four Canadian resorts sit on ground with a strong sound of its own: the St Lawrence, the Niagara gorge, the Fraser estuary and the woodland at Rama. We describe that ground and nothing else. The gaming floor is not described, assessed or recommended anywhere on this site.