Why we only show stays rated 8.0 and above — and what that filters out

Here's the rule first, because it matters more than anything else in this piece: every stay on Plofair carries a guest score of at least 8.0, taken from a minimum of 50 reviews. If a hotel or apartment falls below that, you won't see it in a package, no matter how cheap the room or how tempting the flight times either side of it. That single filter shapes everything else about how a Stansted or Luton weekend away comes together, so it's worth explaining properly rather than just stating it and moving on.

Why 8.0 and not something lower

Anyone who has booked a cheap city break knows the trap. The flight looks brilliant, the price per person looks even better, and then you land on the hotel page and the reviews read like a warning label. Rooms that don't match the photos. Front desks that vanish after 9pm. Air conditioning that's more theoretical than functional. None of that shows up in a headline price, but all of it shows up in your actual weekend.

Guest scores between 6 and 7.9 are where most of that pain lives. They're not disaster territory, hotels rarely score that low, but they're inconsistent enough that a good stay and a miserable one are both plausible outcomes from the same booking. Above 8.0, the variance narrows. Rooms are clean as standard, staff answer the phone, and the gap between what's promised and what's delivered closes right up. That's not a guess, it's the pattern you see once you've watched enough packages long enough.

We could lower the floor and show more stays, more price points, more headline-grabbing "£69pp" packages. We don't, because a package is only as good as the worst part of it, and a bad hotel ruins a good flight far more often than a good hotel rescues a bad one.

What actually gets filtered out

It's worth being blunt about what an 8.0 cutoff removes, because it's not just "bad hotels." It removes a wide slice of budget inventory that's perfectly serviceable for some travellers and genuinely risky for others. Hostels with mixed dorms score all over the place depending on who's reviewing them. Ageing three-star hotels in the right location but with tired bathrooms often sit at 7.2 to 7.6, decent enough on paper, patchy in practice. Apartment listings with thin review counts, sometimes only 8 or 12 reviews, get excluded on volume even if their score looks fine, because a handful of reviews tells you almost nothing reliable.

That last point matters as much as the score itself. A stay showing 9.1 from 6 reviews is not more trustworthy than one showing 8.3 from 400. It's the opposite. Small How many fares we checked swing wildly, one bad guest or one overly generous friend can move the average by half a point. Fifty reviews is roughly where a score starts meaning something rather than reflecting whoever happened to write about their trip that month.

So the filter is really two filters stacked: a quality floor and a confidence floor. Both have to clear before a stay earns a place in a Plofair package.

Where star ratings fit in

Star ratings are the older, blunter measure, set by the hotel itself or a local classification board, not by guests. A three-star hotel and a four-star hotel can both carry a 8.4 guest score. The star rating tells you about facilities, room size, whether there's a lift, whether breakfast is included as standard. The guest score tells you whether people who actually stayed there were happy.

We treat stars as a secondary signal, useful for expectations, not a substitute for the guest score floor. A well-run three-star hotel with an 8.6 score, attentive staff and a great location will usually beat a soulless four-star with an 8.1 score and a check-in queue that eats half an hour of your first evening. When a package includes star information, use it to picture the room size and amenities. Use the guest score to judge whether you'll actually enjoy staying there.

This is also why you won't see us leading with stars in a deal title. "4-star Barcelona weekend" sounds impressive and tells you almost nothing about whether the last 200 guests left happy. "Score 8.4 · 4 nights · £118pp" tells you the thing that predicts your actual experience.

How this plays out across current packages

Our London package checks on 16 August 2026 show the floor doing its job across some of the cheapest routes out there right now. Bergamo, serving Milan, is showing a live Lowest packages of £86 per adult, still comfortably inside the 8.0+ stay filter. Berlin sits at £99 per adult. Porto comes in at £109 per adult, level with Alicante, also £109 per adult. Madrid is the priciest of this group at £111 per adult.

What's notable is that none of these numbers required trading down on stay quality to hit a low headline price. The floor holds regardless of how aggressive the flight fare is. That's deliberate. If a package looks unusually cheap, the saving is coming from the flight, the dates, or a genuine drop against that route's recent pricing, not from quietly swapping in a 7.1-rated hotel to make the maths work.

City	Live Lowest packages (per adult)	Stay filter
Bergamo (Milan)	£86	8.0+ guest score
Berlin	£99	8.0+ guest score
Porto	£109	8.0+ guest score
Alicante	£109	8.0+ guest score
Madrid	£111	8.0+ guest score

If you're weighing these against each other, Bergamo is the standout on price alone, though it's worth remembering that's a package into Milan via its secondary airport, so factor in the transfer time when you're comparing it to a package landing closer to the city itself. Berlin at £99 is the next clear step, and still a genuinely low figure for a city break with a filtered, well-reviewed stay attached.

Why we don't chase headline-price stays instead

It would be easy to build a version of Plofair that surfaces the absolute lowest price per person for every route, full stop, no stay filter. That version would generate more eye-catching headlines. It would also, fairly often, be pointing people towards a room that looks nothing like its photos or a front desk that's an intercom and a locked door after dark.

We're not interested in that trade. The whole point of watching prices daily is to find real drops on stays worth booking, not to manufacture bargains by lowering the bar on quality until the number looks dramatic. A £109 package to Alicante with an 8.2-rated stay is worth more to an actual traveller than a £79 package with a 6.9-rated stay, even though the second one reads better in a subject line.

This is also why you'll never see us naming which booking platforms or hotel partners sit behind a given stay. What we can tell you, honestly, is the score, the review count, the star rating where available, and how the total package price compares with what that route has looked like recently. That's the information that actually helps you decide, not a supplier name that changes nothing about your stay.

What this means for how you should book

Treat the 8.0 floor as a baseline, not a finish line. Within packages that clear it, there's still a real range worth paying attention to. An 8.1 with 60 reviews and an 8.7 with 900 reviews are not equivalent, even though both pass the filter. If two packages are close on price, the one with the higher score and the deeper review count is usually the safer pick, especially for a short weekend where you don't have spare time to sort out a room problem on day one.

Star ratings are worth a glance when you want a sense of physical space, lift access, or whether breakfast is likely included, particularly useful if you're travelling with a partner or a small group and room size matters more than usual. But don't let a four-star badge override a lower guest score. The guest score is people who were actually there. The star rating is a classification made before any of them checked in.

If you're comparing cities rather than just hotels, the current spread from £86 (Bergamo) to £111 (Madrid) gives you a sense of where the value sits this week. All five routes above clear the same 8.0+ stay filter, so the price difference is genuinely about the route and the dates, not about one city getting a worse hotel deal than another.

Where to go from here

Have a look through the current London weekend packages and you'll see the 8.0 floor applied across every route, from the cheapest options through to the pricier city breaks. If none of today's prices suit your dates, set up price alerts and we'll flag it when a route you care about drops, still filtered to stays worth actually booking, never a lower bar dressed up as a bargain.

Compare live Barcelona, Lisbon, Porto, and Rome packages from London — guest score 8.0+ stays only.