Grading Information
What does Grading mean for you?
When choosing your holiday accommodation, look for the Cymru/Wales quality mark of Wales’ official, nationwide quality assessment scheme, then you can be confident that it has been checked out before you check in.
Is there any difference between Visit Wales and other grading schemes ?
All the national assessing bodies (Visit England, VisitScotland,Visit Wales and the AA) now assess holiday accommodation to the same criteria and award one to five stars.
The stars reflect the facilities and overall quality of the experience.
How do we assess properties ?
Our Quality Wales team of professional assessors visit each property every other year, including properties handled by self-catering agencies. Visit Wales is the premier assessing agency for accommodation in Wales..
What do our star ratings mean?
Businesses that are graded receive a rating between one and five stars based on the facilities available and overall quality of the experience.
There are three elements involved in the processing in arriving at Star Rating for a business.
1. Quality of the Business
Our Quality Assessors assess every aspect of the business and that score equates to a quality level description. A scale of 1 to 5 is used – Excellent Quality scores 5 points, acceptable quality scores 1 point.
Excellent Quality: 5 points
Very Good Quality: 4 points
Good Quality: 3 points
Quite Good Quality: 2 points
Acceptable Quality: 1 point
Once all aspects are assessed, scores are totalled and a quality score for the whole of the business is calculated.
2. Consistency in Key Areas of the Business
The Quality Assessor then checks for consistency in the key areas of the business. The purpose of this approach is to ensure that one aspect of the business has not, by scoring high marks, driven up the overall percentage into the next Star rating level, giving a false impression to the guest of the overall quality. It is vitally important that the quality of the key areas matches the overall grade of the business
3. Facility Requirements
The Quality Assessor will check to ensure that any additional facilities/services required at a particular level are present and available, as well as those at all preceding Star Levels. Research has shown us that the higher the rating, the more facilities and services expected by the consumer.
Does a lower star rating equal less quality ?
Many lower star rated accommodations may still offer high quality, but do not meet all of the facility and service expectations for the higher star ratings.
For example Visit Wales applies different and many more criteria requirements when assessing Hotels than they do to Guest Accommodation business (e.g. B&B’s, Guest Houses).
This is based on Consumer research where there is an expectation that Hotels, by their vary nature will provide more facilities than B&B’s and Guest Houses. The grading criteria reflects this so it particularly important not to compare a 4-star Guest Accommodation rating with a 4-star hotel rating. Different criteria apply.
The advice – always check with the establishment before booking to check that they offer the services and facilities that meet your needs – they will be only too pleased to help.”