Every score on CompareVillas comes with its working shown. This page sets out exactly how we measure, what we honestly can't measure yet, and how the site earns — so you can judge our judgement.
We only score what we can verify from data we're entitled to use. Each dimension below tells you the source, the method, and the honest limits of both.
We compute walking distance to the nearest beach using OpenStreetMap beach and coastline data plus a walking-route calculation — the path your feet would actually take, not a straight line drawn over a cliff. Distances start from the villa location the operator publishes on its own listing — never a geocoding guess — and run to the beach's nearest access point, not the middle of the sand. One thing we'll say plainly: our number is only as precise as the operator's published pin, and a villa more than 250m from any mapped path gets no number at all rather than a guess. We also measure the climb on the way back along the same route, from open elevation data (Copernicus EU-DEM, ~25m grid) — so "600m to the beach" can't hide a cliff path home. That grid reflects real hills, not individual steps, and we band the climb accordingly. Airport transfers are measured as the fastest driving route over open map data, quoted as a no-traffic estimate rounded to five minutes; on slow rural roads the model errs on the generous side, so treat longer estimates as upper bounds — and allow more everywhere in high season.
Private pool, air conditioning, cot and highchair, parking, step-free access: we score amenity fit against your stated priorities using the operator's published specification only. We don't infer amenities from photos and we don't take an owner's word for anything that isn't in the formal spec. If the spec doesn't say it, we don't score it.
Can you stroll to a restaurant, a bakery, a shop for the morning bread run — or is every meal a drive? We count points of interest within walking range using open map data. Open map coverage is excellent in established resorts and thinner in rural areas, so where the data is sparse we say so rather than scoring on silence.
Coming A price-fairness score is on our roadmap, but we won't publish it until it can include all mandatory fees — cleaning, service fees and other compulsory charges — because a comparison built on headline prices alone would repeat the exact problem we exist to fix. That's our true-cost pledge, and you can read the thinking behind it in our guide to the true cost of a villa holiday.
Peacefulness and noise. "Tranquil", "secluded", "peaceful" — the words every listing reaches for, and the ones no listing can prove. There's no reliable open data source for noise at villa level, and listing claims are unverifiable, so we don't score it. When we find a data source we trust, we'll add it — and explain it here first.
Anything derived from guest reviews. Review text on booking platforms belongs to those platforms and their reviewers. We won't republish or mine review text we don't have rights to, so no score on this site is built on it. It costs us a useful signal, but a score we can't lawfully substantiate isn't a score — it's a liability wearing a number.
Plainly: once our affiliate-network applications are approved, some outbound links to villa companies and booking platforms will become affiliate links that pay us a commission if you go on to book. That's the whole business model. You never pay more by clicking our links, and we never handle your booking or your money — you always book directly with the provider.
Three rules keep the commission and the scoring apart:
One more honest note: we don't cover everywhere. We cover 25 destinations and the villas we've hand-checked within them — because we'd rather do those properly than the whole Mediterranean badly. Coverage grows as our data does, and where we haven't measured, we say nothing rather than something vague.
If you own or manage a villa — or run a villa company — and believe a score is wrong, challenge it. Send us your evidence and we'll re-measure against the underlying data. If we got it wrong, we correct it and publish the correction with a date stamp; if the data supports the original score, we'll show you the working. Either way you get an answer, not a shrug.
We keep substantiation for every published score: a snapshot of the source data and the date it was taken. When a score changes, the "Checked" date changes with it — so a reader can always tell how fresh a claim is, and we can always show where a number came from. Readers who spot an error get the same treatment: tell us via our complaints page and we'll investigate.
CompareVillas is built by The Media Den, a UK independent publisher of honest comparison sites. We're an introducer, not a travel agent or booking platform: we compare accommodation only, we take no bookings and handle no payments, and your contract is always with the company you book with. More about us and how we work is on our about page.
No. Scores come from data — map measurements and published specifications — not from commercial relationships. No company can pay for placement, buy a better score, or see a verdict before it's published. The only way to change a score is to change the underlying facts, or to show us with evidence that our data is wrong.
Every factual section carries a "Checked" date so you can see exactly how fresh it is. We re-measure when the underlying map data or a listing's published specification changes, when a reader or villa company flags a discrepancy with evidence, and on a routine review cycle. Corrections are published with a date stamp.
We show our measurement and say where it came from — the walking route from the operator's own published villa location over OpenStreetMap paths. If a discrepancy is large we flag it rather than silently pick a side, and we invite the operator to send evidence so we can re-measure.
UK price-transparency rules require headline prices to include all mandatory charges, and we hold ourselves to the same standard. Until our price-fairness score can include every mandatory fee, we won't publish it. A partial price is a misleading price — see our true-cost guide.