Every autumn, travel lists fill up with hotels scoring 98-something and cities crowned "best in the world". The Condé Nast Traveller Readers' Choice Awards are behind a lot of them, and the mechanics are simpler than the glossy results suggest. The 2026 edition is the 29th round of an annual survey where readers — not a panel of editors — pick the winners.
Voting happens through a secure page at cntraveller.com/vote, open for a fixed window each year; for the 2026 awards, ratings were collected between 1 April and 30 June. Condé Nast itself tallies the results from thousands of respondents. The questionnaire doesn't leave things open-ended: candidates are pre-listed across categories like hotels, resorts, airlines, cities, islands and cruise lines, and readers rate them.
There are two filters before anything gets a trophy. A candidate needs a minimum number of responses and a minimum overall rating to even qualify — so a beloved boutique hotel with three votes can't sneak onto the list. Scoring then works on a five-point scale (excellent, very good, good, fair, poor) converted into a percentage. Ratings across all relevant criteria for a category are averaged to four decimal places, with two decimals published. That's why you see oddly precise numbers like the 98.13 scored by the Upper House in Hong Kong: it reflects averaged reader marks on rooms, service, food, design, activities and location, plus cleanliness, community investment, concierge and facilities.
Why does this matter if you're booking a trip? Because the methodology is what separates these awards from pure marketing. The winners are aggregated opinion from a large respondent pool over a set period, judged on concrete criteria rather than a single writer's stay. A high score means a lot of people rated many specific things — from the concierge to the breakfast — as excellent. It's still crowd opinion, with all the taste biases that implies, but it's a reasonably robust crowd.
For travellers, the practical takeaway is to read the category, not just the rank. A 97 in the cruise line category tells you something different from a 97 for an island, since the criteria differ. And because the survey window closes in June each year, results reflect reader experiences from spring and earlier — worth remembering if a hotel has recently changed management or renovated. Treat the list as a shortlist of reliably well-rated options, then cross-check recent reviews for anything time-sensitive.
