How we rank properties

The short version

In the default view, properties that accept booking requests through this website — and that actually answer them — appear above the rest. Those properties pay us commission when a stay goes ahead. Everything else is ordered by how recently it was added.

You can always tell which is which: a lifted listing carries a Direct booking badge on its card.

What lifts a listing

One thing, and it has a condition attached. A property is lifted when both of these are true:

• It is a partner property — it accepts booking requests on this site, and pays us a percentage of the accommodation total for stays that result. That commission is paid by the property and is not added to your bill.
• It answers its requests. We track the share of requests each partner answers and how long it takes. A partner that answers fewer than half of them loses the lift and takes its ordinary place in the list.

A partner that has just joined, or has had too few requests to judge, keeps the lift. It has not failed at anything, and without it there would be no requests from which to build a record.

A property that loses the lift keeps its badge, because it does still accept requests. It simply stops appearing above everything else.

What does not affect ranking

• Paying more does not buy a higher position. There is no paid placement, no sponsored slot, and no bidding. Partners are not ordered among themselves by what they pay, and a property paying a higher commission rate does not outrank one paying less.
• Nothing can be bought at all. We do not sell position, and there is no fee for being listed. Every property in the directory is there because we chose to include it.
• Affiliate earnings do not affect it. For most properties we link to booking platforms such as Booking.com or Expedia and may earn a commission from them. Which platform we link to, and what it pays, has no bearing on where the property appears.
• Sorting and filtering are untouched. When you sort by price or by name, or filter by region, amenity or anything else, the result is exactly what you asked for. The lift applies only to the default order — a commercial thumb on a price sort would make that sort lie.

The default order, in full

1. Partner properties that answer their requests, most recently added first.
2. Everything else — including partners that do not answer — most recently added first.

Recency is the tiebreak because it is the one signal we can apply evenly to every property. We do not rank by guest rating: the ratings shown come from Google and cover a small and uneven share of the directory, so ordering by them would mostly reflect which properties happen to have been reviewed.

Editorial content

Articles, guides and any list where we name specific properties are chosen editorially. A commercial relationship does not earn a mention, and we do not accept payment for one. Where an article links to a property, the same affiliate disclosure in our Terms applies.

Questions and complaints

If you are a property and believe your listing is ranked wrongly, or you want to know why a change happened, write to us at hello@winery-hotels.com and we will explain. If we change how ranking works, we update this page and this date.