The Hedonic Loyalty Index · Edition 01 · 2026

The number a star rating can’t show.

A rating tells you how the stay went. The Index tells you whether they’re coming back — the one measure the industry calls the only one that matters, and the one nobody publishes. We read it from the guests’ own public words.

The rating implies+74
Guests will actually defend+35
A 39-point gap, across 117 hotels.
That gap is the Index — and it’s the part that decides who returns.
The principle

You can’t enter it. You can’t buy it. You can’t lobby it. Your guests decide.

Every other hotel ranking takes submissions, fees, and a nudge from a good PR team. This one is read from the public reviews your guests already wrote — so there is nothing to enter, no one to wine and dine, and no way to game it. It is published whether a property pays or not. Independence isn’t a feature of the Index; it’s the whole point of it.

01

Edition 01 — the founding read

117 hotels across six countries, 259,113 guest reviews, 2003–2026. The first published read on the axis a star rating can’t reach: whether guests come back.

The 8/10 goodbye
1 in 13
repeat guests write it got worse — a quarter still rate it 8/10+.
Loyalty has a name
4.2×
more staff named by guests at the most loyal hotels than the least.
Two small things
82%
detract when two failures land in one stay — odds predict 48%.
The comeback
13.95%
advocate after a fixed-and-told problem — beating a flawless stay.
The wedding tax
7.7×
the detractor rate on a wedding stay with one thing wrong.
Rate doesn’t buy it
0
correlation between room rate and loyalty — luxury sits at both extremes.
02

Be in Edition 02

For a property

The Index reads from public reviews, so any property can be measured — no sign-up, no data to send. Tell us the property and it joins the next read. You can’t buy a result; you can only earn one.

For an owner or investor

The same read runs on a single asset you own, an operator you’re reviewing, an acquisition target, or a competitor — a finished analysis for the seat the star rating never served.

For the press

The metric, the method, and the cohort figures are open to cite. When the industry argues about loyalty, it can argue from one published source.

03

A rating ranks the hotel. The Index reads its future.

Hedonic Intelligence reads public hotel reviews for what guests actually experienced — and whether they’ll be back — and delivers it as a single decision-grade brief. The Index is the public face of that read.

Public reviews only — no operator data, no PMS, no guest PII. Edition figures computed per review, sample-size gated, point-in-time. A read on a named property is the paid engagement.