How to read hotel reviews for cleanliness — evidence, not vibes

A 4.3-star hotel can have a mould problem. Aggregate ratings average away the one thing you may care about most, because a spectacular view and a friendly manager can outvote a bathroom nobody scrubbed. If cleanliness matters to you, the overall score is close to useless.

What actually works

• Find the cleanliness subscore, where one exists. Some platforms publish per-category ratings, and a cleanliness number that lags the overall score by half a point or more is a flag worth taking seriously.
• Read the recent negative reviews first. Housekeeping changes with staff and management. A complaint from three years ago is history; three complaints from the last two months are a pattern.
• Search for the specific words. Mould, damp, smell, hair, stains, cockroach, bedbugs. Guests who found these things use these words.
• Trust quotes over summaries. “Clean enough” in a summary could mean anything. “The sheets had stains and the bathroom smelled of damp” tells you exactly what you're buying.
• Treat silence honestly. If fifty reviews say nothing about cleanliness either way, that's usually fine news — but it's a different fact than fifty guests praising it.

What StayLens does with this method

We built this exact checklist into the product. Every stay's reviews are read for you, and the hygiene verdict follows three hard rules: any numeric cleanliness score is a provider's real published subscore, never our invention; every claim is backed by verbatim quotes from actual reviews, shown with their source; and when the reviews are silent on cleanliness, we say exactly that instead of guessing.

Evidence, not vibes. It's more work — that's why we automated it.