The notebook
Editorial policy
The notebook has rules, and this page is where they are written down: what gets covered, how breakfasts are priced, how the euros are recorded and what no house can buy.
Rini Hotel Notes covers one subject and covers it the same way every time. This page states the rules of the notebook, so that a reader knows what a note means and a hotelier knows what cannot be bought.
What qualifies for a note
Small independent houses, family run in spirit if not always in law, of roughly ten to thirty rooms, with rates at or under EUR 120 a night for a double in fair season. The notebook covers types of stay in real places: named quarters, named stations, named seasons. It does not cover chains, resorts with three pools, or places it cannot describe honestly. No note is written from a comped stay or an inspection visit; the value of a note is the method a reader can repeat.
The six checks
Every note applies the same six checks before any rate is recommended: the windows, the lift and the floor, the noise of the street, the breakfast wording, the honest walking distance from the station and the small print of the final figure. Breakfasts are priced against the public five mark scale of the continental breakfast note. Prices are recorded as bands by season, read from published rates, never as single quotations, and city taxes are named where they apply, a rule the listing checks enforce on this notebook's own copy as much as on the platforms.
Independence and corrections
No house, board or platform has paid for, previewed or approved a note on this site. Any sponsored placement, if one is ever accepted, obeys the sponsored content rules and can never touch a rate line, a band or a ranking. Corrections from readers, applied through the contact page, are recorded on the page they improve, and a band that has moved is rewritten rather than quietly defended.