About Fat Voyage
The world’s most extraordinary hotels deserve more than a star rating and a stock photo.
Finding an honest opinion about a luxury stay shouldn’t be this hard. Too often it comes down to sponsored feeds, review averages where every $1,500-a-night hotel scores a 4.7, or top-ten lists by people who have never set foot in the lobby.
So we built something else. We read the trip reports luxury travellers write after their stays, thousands of them, and our own engine weighs every one to find the hotels that really deliver. It’s the second opinion we always wanted before booking.
Photo: SingitaSerengeti, Tanzania · 30 reports · re-scored 7 Sep
How the Fat Score works
Every hotel gets one score out of 20, built from five things: service, rooms & design, location, dining and wellness.
To get there, our own engine reads thousands of trip reports from the communities where luxury travellers compare notes, alongside verified guest reviews and the critics. It pays most attention to the detailed, the credible and the recent. No hotel can score 20; the highest in the collection today is 18.5.
Depth over brevity
A detailed review counts for far more than a line or two, and a trip report from the fat-travel forums counts most of all.
Recency first
A stay from two months ago matters more than one from three years ago.
Consistency
No single stay decides a hotel’s score; the same problem across several recent stays does.
Our custom technology does the heavy lifting, analysing signals at a scale no human team could match. But our team defines the rules—what it reads, how much each voice counts, and what a verdict is never allowed to say—and we step in when it gets something wrong. Technology gathers the evidence; our editorial judgment shapes how it’s read.
The three tiers
Every hotel in the collection sits in one of three tiers.
Fat Legend
18 out of 20 and above
As good as a hotel gets: the hotels people plan whole trips around.
Every Fat LegendFat Favorite
16 to 17.5 out of 20
The kind you go back to, and where most of the collection sits. It’s a wide band: the higher the number, the closer a hotel came to being a Legend.
Every Fat FavoriteFat Approved
15 to 15.5 out of 20
In the collection, and we’d send you: the verdict says which trip each one is right for. A hotel already in the collection that slips to 14.5 stays Fat Approved.
Every Fat Approved
A hotel joins at 15.0 and only leaves the collection if it falls below 14.5, so one weaker re-score doesn’t bounce it in and out. Hotels that don’t make it keep their page, so you can see why, but we never recommend them.
Hotels change: a new chef, a renovation, a new manager. So every few months we read everything written about each one again, new reports included, and the tier follows.
The Founders’ Verdict
Some hotels we go and see for ourselves. What we write afterwards is a Founders’ Verdict, in our own words.
Sometimes we pay, sometimes a hotel invites us. Either way, a free night never buys a better score: our stay goes into the Fat Score as one traveller’s report, weighted the same as a detailed trip report from the fat-travel forums.
All Founders’ Verdicts
Photo: Champagne Hospitality Three nights, September 2026, paid by us Château la Commaraine Pommard, France
Photo: Four Seasons Two nights, August 2026, paid by us Four Seasons Hotel London at Tower Bridge London, United Kingdom
Photo: Rosewood Twice — September 2025 and March 2026, paid by us Rosewood Schloss Fuschl Hof bei Salzburg, Austria
Photo: Champagne Hospitality One night, November 2024, paid by us Royal Champagne Hotel & Spa Champillon, France
Who we are
Nicolas & Sofie
Nicolas founded Fat Voyage.
He comes from a tech background, having previously built software products before turning his attention to modernising travel media. Sofie travels on every stay, and together we write every Founders’ Verdict on the site.
Fat Voyage grew out of a shared obsession with the quiet craft of exceptional hospitality—the way a truly great hotel can make you feel completely at ease. It’s here to give travellers a quiet, beautiful, and candid corner of the internet where the details actually matter.
Common questions
What is the Fat Score?
Fat Voyage’s score for luxury hotels, out of 20, built from five parts: service, rooms & design, location, dining and wellness. It’s read from what travellers wrote after their stays: trip reports from the most active luxury travel communities, critics’ reviews and detailed guest reviews. The detailed, credible and recent ones count most.
How is the Fat Score calculated?
We read everything we can find about each hotel: trip reports from the most active luxury travel communities, Google reviews from guests, and the publications that still send a critic (Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, The Telegraph, Forbes Travel Guide). Our own engine weighs each one by how detailed it is, how credible the writer is and how recently they stayed, and when five people who stayed separately say the same thing, that counts for more than any one of them. What comes out is one score out of 20, in half-point steps.
What are the Fat Score tiers?
A hotel joins the collection at 15.0 and keeps its place until it drops below 14.5. Inside the collection there are three tiers. Fat Legend (18.0+) is as good as a hotel gets. Fat Favorite (16.0–17.5) is where most of the collection sits: the kind you go back to. Fat Approved (15.0–15.5) is in the collection too, and its verdict says which trip it is right for. We don’t cover every hotel that calls itself luxury in the first place: where it is, the building and its reputation for service decide what we write about.
How often are scores refreshed?
Every few months, each hotel is read again in full, with everything written since added, and scored afresh from the whole three-year window. Renovations, new managers and staff turnover all show up in what the next guests write, so a score can move between refreshes. Each hotel page shows when it was last re-scored and when the next one is due.
Do you accept payment from hotels?
No. Hotels can’t pay to be in the collection, to raise their Fat Score or to have a bad review taken down. Where a booking link earns us a commission, it says so right beside the button, and it never changes a score or a placement.
What if a hotel disagrees with its score?
A hotel can point out a factual error at any time, and we’ll fix it. We don’t soften opinions: the score reflects what travellers report, not what the hotel would prefer.
How is Fat Voyage different from other luxury hotel sites?
Most luxury hotel sites give you one editor’s stay, or a booking platform’s star ratings. Fat Voyage reads what the people who stayed wrote: trip reports from the most active luxury travel communities, critics’ reviews and verified Google reviews, turned into one score and one verdict per hotel. Reading all of that is the difference.
Is Fat Voyage used by AI search engines?
Yes. Every page is written to answer the question plainly, so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews can cite it when a traveller asks where to stay.
Have a question, feedback, or a hotel recommendation?
Write to us at hello@fat.voyage. It comes straight to the two of us.