About Our Accommodation Reviews

For general information about DoChara please see here.

We have provided answers here about how we select the hotels and other accommodation in Ireland that we have reviewed. If you have any other questions please contact us.

Have you checked out all the places you recommend?

Yes and no, but we are completely satisfied about their standards.

We never check anywhere out purely for review purposes. If a place is good we or someone whose opinion we value will get along there anyway as a matter of course. We stay in various types of Irish accommodation very regularly.

If we don't know an area well or have not been there recently we call a friend who lives there and ask them what local places they would recommend to a friend or get them to mosey along and have a look if there is something new. We have friends pretty much everywhere in Ireland.

We don't pay these people - they are people who stay in hotels etc all the time and tend to get out and about in their locality and to recommend local places to visitors on a regular basis. They already know what's good.

If we had to pay them to go somewhere then we really wouldn't want to list it or recommend it to our users.

Do people pay for listings?

No accommodartion has paid for a review nor will any ever be recommended simply because someone is willing to pay. There are a gazillion sites with paid listings of one type or another, we are not aiming to emulate them.

We frequently review and list good places to stay in Ireland without even contacting their owners, simply because we know that our users will enjoy them.

Quality is the only reason for inclusion.

I stayed in a place you recommended and it was awful!

Please, please let us know what went wrong!

We constantly alter our listings because standards do not remain constant, properties may come under new management and changing circumstances can mean that standards in a particular accommodation drop. We will take your comments seriously and if it is warrented we will remove the property from our listing.

I stayed somewhere you do not have in your recommendations and it was great!

Let us know. We will make some further checks before deciding whether to list it, but with thousands of places to stay out there, we are always delighted to hear of new places or ones we are not aware of that may be worth listing.

You have no accommodation listed for the places I want to stay

Please contact us letting us know the areas in which you are seeking accommodation and in what price range. We have a lot of contacts all over the country and will be happy to track down somewhere good for you.

I run a great hotel/guest house/B&B/hostel, how do I get listed?

We list a number of places in each region of Ireland to stay, at various price points. We believe that these are among the best in the locality and they are the places we would recommend to a friend.

There are loads of sites with exhaustive lists, usually not chosen for quality, and long indiscriminate lists are not particularly helpful. Visitors just want to know about a few really good places they can rely on.

You can email us if you would like to be listed. We may list you, if you are genuinely good and if there is a reason to - for example if you are really among the best in your area, you offer exceptional value or you have something unique to offer. Or we may not.

In either case we will make an independent check first so that we can provide our users with a genuine opinion and a review.

We were listed - now we're not. Why?

Things change. Most likely we heard from some people who didn't think you were keeping standards as high as they were in the past. Or it may be that other places in your area have opened and standards have risen. It happens.

We cannot fit unlimited numbers of listings and aim to include the places we believe are the best.

That's not very fair is it?

It's our site and we make the rules. In fact we believe our policies are very fair to the users of the site. If we listing things willy-nilly or purely in return for payment, then our 'recommendation' would be entirely meaningless. It isn't meaningless and we take it very seriously.

The whole point is that the listings and the articles are totally independent. We apply only one very simple rule when deciding what to list - if we think we would tell a friend visiting Ireland about something or somewhere, it's in, if not then there is no imaginable reason why we should include it.

Your Comments

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