Decoding hotel ratings: What’s a star-crossed traveler to do?

So you’re thinking about a luxury getaway to New York, and the four-star Plaza Hotel and Waldorf Astoria are on your wish list. But why not the Your Stay Broadway Apartments?

To my surprise (and no disrespect intended to Your Stay), Hotels.com rates all three as four-star properties. It is but one of the many mysteries of online hotel star ratings.

A hotel’s star rating depends on websites’ subjective and often inconsistent rating systems. You’ll find inconsistencies even among sites owned by the same corporation -- for example, IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned Expedia, Hotwire and Hotels.com. Travelocity alone employs three hotel rating systems: its own, AAA’s diamond ratings and traveler reviews.

To try to better understand these hotel star-rating wars, I looked at a couple of New York hotels I know.

The Milford Plaza Hotel, a tourist-class hotel near Times Square, is rated three stars by SideStep.com’s search engine, 2.5 stars at Hotels.com and two stars at Travelocity. The hotel is well located, but my experience there suggests that Travelocity’s rating is closest to reality.

Compare that to the Warwick Hotel, one of my favorite moderately priced New York hotels. The rooms are large by New York standards, and the decor, although dated, reflects the historic character of this 1927 building. Hotels.com gives it three stars, as do Expedia, SideStep, Travelocity; Orbitz ranks it four.

One of the limitations of any star system is that many properties probably fall somewhere in between stars. I’d certainly rank the Warwick higher than the Milford Plaza, but would I rate it the same as the Plaza or the Waldorf? Probably not. For me, the Warwick is 3.5 stars.

How hotels are rated is especially important to consumers booking hotels on opaque sites such as Hotwire and Priceline, which rely heavily on star ratings and reveal the name of the hotel only after it has been purchased. In December, Priceline compared hotel star ratings against Hotwire’s to see if there was consistency between their ratings systems. The survey looked at more than 600 hotels and found that they agreed only about 10% of the time.

What’s a hotel shopper to do?

* Read the fine print. Because every site employs a different rating system, read the description of how it qualifies its stars. For example, a three-star property at Priceline will have a 24-hour front desk, room service and a restaurant; at Hotwire, room service, valet parking, fitness centers and pools are “sometimes” available at three-star hotels, according to its website.

* If you end up with a hotel that doesn’t live up to its published star rating, complain to the website on which you booked it, even if it is an opaque site.

* Seek advice. If you are using Priceline or Hotwire, visit a site like www.betterbidding.com before you commit. There you can learn which hotels in a particular category have been successfully secured.

* Listen to your fellow travelers. I find Travelocity’s traveler reviews of properties helpful. Although you occasionally find someone with an ax to grind, reading enough of them can give you a good sense of a property. Also try www.tripadvisor.com, another good source of feedback from travelers.

* When all else fails, consult a trusted expert. Most travel publications have an online component: www.latimes.com/travel, www.fodors.com, www.frommers.com and so on. Travel writers have stayed at lots of hotels and are generally unbiased -- and they can tell you that the disparity between a Milford Plaza and a Warwick Hotel is more than in the stars.

Contact James Gilden at www.theinternettraveler.com.