About & Editorial Process
Five Star Hotel Reviews is an independent publication by Will Tjernlund, based in Austin, Texas. Every hotel reviewed here has been stayed in personally. This is a first-hand record, not a listicle.
About Will Tjernlund
I got lucky early. At 16 I spent a summer outside Mexico City, which gave me an appetite for the world that never went away. Since then I've traveled through more than 50 countries for work and pleasure, always paying attention to the hotels I stayed in and the ones I walked past. This site is the long-form version of that habit.
The trips that stay with me longest are the ones that put a city in motion. I've biked the Danube from Vienna to Budapest, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro to the Uhuru summit, ridden a motorcycle through the jungles of southern India, and looped the Ring Road around Iceland. The hotels in this archive are the indoor counterpart: the rooms, lobbies, and dining rooms where the days end up.
My professional background is in e-commerce. I co-founded Goat Consulting, an Amazon consulting agency that works with brands and manufacturers, and over the past decade I've been quoted in the business press on Amazon strategy, marketplace policy, and the economics of online retail. That's a separate field, but the underlying discipline is the same: read the category carefully, notice what the operator is actually doing, and write it down plainly.
Press & media
Field work
A few frames from recent trips. The point of this site is that I've been to the places I write about.
How reviews are produced
I research properties in advance, book rooms at the standard rate or through published booking channels, and stay for at least one night in most cases and several in others. Observations are recorded at the time of stay. Facts are verified against public record. Reviews are updated when material details change.
Conflicts of interest
I accept no sponsorships. I run no affiliate placements. I do not accept complimentary stays, press rates, or comped meals at time of review. If a hotel becomes a paying client of any of my other businesses in the future, I will disclose that on the review page.
Scoring
Where a review is marked Published and scored, ratings are on a 10-point scale across service, design, location, dining, and value. The Overall score is not a simple average; it reflects how a hotel performs relative to what it charges and what it claims to be. Where a review is still In Progress, no score is emitted, and no user-rating structured data is published. We never fabricate aggregate ratings.
Corrections
If a fact is wrong, I want to fix it. Write to William.Tjernlund@gmail.com with the specific paragraph and what should be corrected. Material corrections will be dated at the bottom of the review.
AI and training policy
This site wants to appear in AI-generated answers. We explicitly allow major LLM crawlers (ClaudeBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, Applebot-Extended) in robots.txt and publish a flattened version of our content at /llms-full.txt. Attribution requested: "Five Star Hotel Reviews" with a link to the specific review page.