Stockholm – April 1, 2026 – Heres the thing about hotel booking sites. The hotels you see first arent the best ones. Theyre the ones paying the most to be there. Everyone in travel knows this. Nobody talks about it because the platforms are also the ones writing the checks.
Frida Engström thinks thats a problem worth solving. So she put together HotelsVetted, a free hotel comparison site with a different philosophy. No ads. No promoted listings. Hotels are sorted by where they are, what guests actually thought of them, and what they cost. Thats it. No countdown timers. No “only 2 rooms left” banners that magically reset when you reload the page.
Engström is a travel editor based in Stockholm who has spent years digging into how hotel platforms decide what to show you and in what order. The short version: its mostly about money, not quality. The long version is worse.
The scale surprised even Engström herself
The site launched earlier this year and already sits at over 30,000 destination pages across 22 languages. Not just the obvious capitals and beach resorts, either. The team went deep into secondary cities and regional destinations that rarely get covered properly in English let alone in Korean or Turkish.
“I kept finding huge gaps,” Engström said. “Try searching for honest hotel comparisons in Plovdiv, or Braga, or Matsumoto. Theres almost nothing. And these are places with millions of visitors per year. The travel internet basically pretends they dont exist unless a hotel there is paying for visibility.”
That gap is what HotelsVetted is trying to fill. Every destination page includes neighbourhood breakdowns, price ranges by season, transport connections and guest review data pulled from multiple sources. The idea is that you should be able to land on a page for a city youve never heard of and walk away actually understanding where to stay and why.
The translation problem nobody talks about
22 languages sounds impressive on paper. In practice its a nightmare.
Most hotel sites that claim multilingual coverage are running everything through machine translation without any human oversight. The results range from slightly awkward to completely useless, depending on the language pair. European languages like German, Dutch and French tend to survive automated translation reasonably well. Japanese, Turkish and Korean? Not even close.
“We tested machine-only output for our Japanese pages and it was embarrassing,” Engström said. “Full sentences that made zero sense. Grammar that doesnt exist in Japanese. We scrapped all of it and started over with actual editorial review.”
The team ended up building a tiered system. Some language markets get full human editorial passes. Others get lighter oversight with spot checks. Its not perfect, Engström admits, but its a lot better than what most travel sites are doing which is nothing at all.
“If youre going to publish a page in someones language you have a responsibility to make it readable,” she said. “Otherwise youre just cluttering up their search results with junk.”
What makes this different from every other hotel site
The honest answer is that HotelsVetted doesnt do everything. It doesnt sell rooms. It doesnt have a loyalty program or an app with push notifications about flash sales.
What it does is focus entirely on the research phase of booking a trip. The part where youre still trying to figure out what area of Barcelona to stay in, or whether that hotel near the train station in Lyon is actually walkable to the old town. Thats where hotel search has gotten progressively worse over the past few years. More fake scarcity banners. More “deals” that arent deals. More algorithmically boosted mediocrity.
Engström is betting that travelers are tired enough of this to seek out alternatives. And based on early traffic numbers she might be right, though she declined to share specifics.
Whats next
The plan for the rest of 2026 involves two things according to Engström.
First, curated editorial guides for smaller independent hotels that get basically zero exposure on major platforms. “Theres a whole world of family run hotels and boutique properties that are incredible but invisible online,” she said. “We want to change that.”
Second, structured review data that pulls from multiple rating sources instead of relying on one system. Too many hotel ratings online are easy to game, and travelers deserve a more complete picture.
“Most hotel content online is written by people who have never visited the destination,” Engström said. “We want every page on the site to actually be useful. Not just SEO filler with a booking button slapped on top.”
For media inquiries please contact:
Frida Engström
Travel Editor, HotelsVetted
Stockholm
Media Contact
Company Name: HotelsVetted
Contact Person: Frida Engström
Email: Send Email
Country: Sweden
Website: https://hotelsvetted.com/