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How We Rate Hotels at Excellent Romantic Vacations

Making sure it's a 2-person tub! This Sacramento hotel has since renovated and removed its tubs, which is exactly why we re-check every listing.

Posted: Nov 3, 2026

For more than 20 years, Maureen and I have been searching out hotel suites with in-room jetted tubs for couples. Every hotel on ERV gets the same set of scores, so you can compare places at a glance. Here’s exactly how we arrive at them.

Two Kinds of Reviews

Some hotels on ERV we’ve stayed in ourselves. You’ll see these marked “We Stayed Here,” with our own photos and, for many, a video room tour we filmed ourselves. For others, we’ve researched carefully using recent guest reviews and photos. Both kinds get an ERV Rating, an √ERV Clean Score and a tub size, but we arrive at them differently, and we think you should know how.

The ERV Rating

When we’ve stayed there, the ERV Rating is our own judgment of:

• the room itself, and how well everything works, especially the tub
• the friendliness of the staff
• value for the money
• the overall experience: romantic atmosphere, how quiet it is, and how convenient the location is

When we haven’t stayed there, we combine the overall guest scores from TripAdvisor and Google Reviews and convert them to a percentage. That gives you a fair picture of what hundreds of real guests have experienced.

The √ERV Clean Score

Nothing spoils a romantic getaway faster than a grubby tub, so cleanliness gets its own score.

When we’ve stayed there, we check the room, then the tub itself, then the common areas like the lobby, halls and pool. Since we never knowingly book a place with a reputation for being dirty, the hotels we stay in usually earn an A or B.

When we haven’t stayed there, we use the cleanliness rating from Google Reviews, convert it to a percentage, and assign a grade:

• A: 80% and up
• B: 70–79%
• C: 60–69%
• D: below 60%

Jetted Tub Size

We ask one simple question: can two people use this tub comfortably? Where we’ve stayed, we know firsthand. Where we haven’t, we study several guest photos of the actual tub before making the call. If it’s really a one-person tub, we’ll do our best to tell you.

Date Last Verified

We double check to make sure that the hotel still offers its jetted tub suites for sale on it's own website (we don't rely on 3rd party hotel sites for that). Because hotels change their amenities, get renovations or even close down, we show the date each listing was last checked.

Our Photos and Videos

Marble Bath with Spa Tub, Kimberly Hotel, NYC

Every video on ERV was filmed by us, on location, during our own stays. Our room tours show you the actual suite and the tub in action, so you know exactly what to expect before you book. We never use hotel-supplied footage. You can watch them all on our Hot Tub Suite Video Page and our YouTube channel.

Photos marked with our ©Excellent Romantic Vacations watermark are ones we took ourselves. For hotels we haven’t visited, we prepare AI-assisted illustrations based on multiple recent guest photos of the actual suite, and we check them carefully so they accurately show what you’ll find.

Our Independence

We pay for our own stays and don’t accept free stays or sponsored content. Hotels can’t pay for a better rating, and they don’t see our reviews before they’re published. When you book through some of our links, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. That’s how we keep ERV running, and it never affects our scores.

Questions about a rating? We’d love to hear from you on our Contact Us page.

About the Author: Greg Mattson, ERV Founder & Editor

Greg Mattson, ERV Editor, brings 35+ years of travel expertise, with over a million miles across 29 countries and 40 U.S. states. A former travel agent & airline professional, he’s stayed in hundreds of hotel honeymoon suites with jetted tubs & walk-in rain showers, curating top romantic getaways for Excellent Romantic Vacations.