How buiigo works

buiigo brings together public information on millions of hotels, apartments, hostels, campsites and other places to stay around the world, organised by country, city and area in 20 languages.

We are not a travel agency and we don’t sell accommodation. We don’t handle bookings or take payments: when you want to book, we send you to a booking site, and your contract is with that site or with the property itself.

Using buiigo is free and you don’t need to sign up.

buiigo is funded by affiliate commissions. The booking button on each listing takes you, through our partner Stay22, to booking sites such as Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Agoda, Trip.com or Vrbo. If you book, we may earn a commission. You pay the same: the commission is not added to your price.

Some listings also link to GetYourGuide tours and activities using the same system: if you book, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

We explain it in detail in our affiliate disclosure.

• Listings: name, type, address, location and photos come from public sources, mainly Google Maps business listings.
• Ratings: the average score and number of reviews are those published on Google Maps (see below for how they work).
• Prices: these are guide prices. We show the date they were checked, and the final price is always confirmed by the booking site.
• Maps and places: OpenStreetMap and OpenFreeMap for maps; GeoNames and Natural Earth for destinations, regions and points of interest.

We update the data regularly and automatically. Even so, it may contain errors or be out of date: if you spot something wrong, email us at ⟦EMAIL⟧.

We list properties that have at least 10 reviews, are not marked as closed and whose category corresponds to tourist accommodation.

No property pays to be listed, and we don’t accept money to include, feature or hide listings.

On each destination page, properties are sorted by a quality score that we calculate in the same way for all of them, using these criteria from most to least important:

• Number of reviews (40%).
• Average rating (35%).
• Whether a photo is available (20%).
• Whether there is a guide price (5%).

Properties near a listing and “near” pages for a place are sorted by distance, and destinations by number of properties.

Commissions have no effect on the order, and nobody can pay to move up.

Ratings (from 1 to 5) and the number of reviews come from Google Maps, where its users publish them. buiigo does not collect its own reviews and does not check that reviewers actually stayed at the property.

Nor do we edit, filter or select them: we show the average and the count exactly as Google Maps publishes them, rounded to one decimal place. Commissions have no effect on the ratings we show.

Some listings show a buiigo score from 0 to 10. It is not a guest review: we calculate it automatically, with the same criteria for every property and using public data only:

• Google Maps rating (50%), adjusted for the number of reviews, so that a high score with few reviews doesn’t count as much as one with many.
• Number of reviews (15%): the more the better, up to the maximum from 2,000 reviews.
• Price compared with the city average (20%): the cheaper it is relative to the average, the higher it scores.
• Distance to the town centre (15%): top marks at 1 km or less, falling gradually up to 15 km.

If a piece of data is missing (the price, for example), that criterion is left out and its weight is shared among the others. We only show the score if the property has a Google Maps rating and at least 5 reviews.

The labels are: Exceptional (9 or more), Excellent (8.5 or more), Very good (8 or more), Good (7 or more), Fair (6 or more) and Acceptable (below 6). Commissions play no part in the calculation.

The prices you see are guide prices (“from … per night”) and refer to the date shown on each listing. The actual price depends on your dates, the number of guests, the room type and availability, and there may be taxes or local charges payable separately.

The final price and booking conditions (payment, cancellation, charges) are the ones the booking site shows you before you confirm.

If you manage a property and want us to correct any details or remove its listing, email us at ⟦EMAIL⟧ with the listing’s address. We’ll review it as soon as possible, free of charge.

You can email us at ⟦EMAIL⟧. Full details of the site owner are in the legal notice.