How Do You Rate a High-End Hotel?
Photo Credit: The Four Seasons Hotel George V, Paris. The property has a five-star rating on the Forbes Travel Guide. Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
Skift Take
Travel guides, in their various forms, are a dying breed, especially those that require an expensive army of reviewers. They are still valued by agents and others in the industry, but with cheaper alternatives out there, how long can they survive?
Luxury Travel News
The Skift New Luxury column is our weekly column focused on the business of selling luxury travel, the people and companies creating and selling experiences, emerging trends, and the changing consumer habits around the sector.
A few weeks ago we reported on Travel + Leisure's changes to its A-List platform: a controversial move designed to monetize one of the publication's most marketable products.
This week we have a different tale, but one that comes from the same luxury travel ratings world.
The Forbes Travel Guide, in various guises, has been around since 1958 and is one of the stalwarts in a fast-changing industry. But running an operation using "anonymous professional inspectors" is a costly enterprise, especially when compared with TripAdvisor and Google.
And then there's the conflict of interest issue. Does the Forbes T
