How we read a year

What we call the quiet half

A quiet half is the stretch when a house is not working at the pace it was built for. Sometimes that means a closed building. Sometimes it means a full building with a shorter list of open doors. Sometimes it means nothing at all, because the place runs at the same rate every week of the year.

The three notes under every entry

The first note describes the loud half: what the house looks like when it is full. The second describes what happens when the people are fewer or the doors are shut. The third says what that slower stretch is used for — the repairs, the replanting, the stripping and refitting that a full house makes impossible.

Why there are no dates here

Seasons are named in words and never in numbers. We publish no months as figures, no opening times and no schedules. Seasonality moves: a closure can be brought forward, a season can be extended, and a printed date would be wrong long before anyone read it. Words like the winter months or the weeks after the snow goes stay true for longer.

Why we do not tell you when to go

We describe how a year is shaped, not which part of it you should choose. We also say nothing about money. There are no prices, no stars, no ratings and no suggestion that a thinner week is a cheaper one. A quiet stretch is a working stretch for the house, and that is the whole of our interest in it.

Airport hotels, and why they have no season

The four capsule addresses in this guide sit inside or beside airports. They have waves of transit and troughs between them, and the year makes no difference to either. We say that plainly rather than inventing a season for them, because an honest answer of no season is still an answer to the question we are asking.

Ask before the season

Every entry ends with one practical line under that label. It is preparation, not complaint. A restaurant, a pool, a lift, a boat or a road can be out of use while the building itself is open, and the only reliable way to know is to ask the hotel before you commit to anything that depends on it.

Set down

The last line of an entry gives a month and a year. That is when we last opened the published material behind the entry and checked what we had written against it. It is not a visit, not an inspection and not a promise that nothing has changed since.

Where the material comes from

We work from published sources: the operators' own material, regional and trade press, park and municipal information. We write it in our own words. Where a name or an operator has recently changed, we use the current one. A hotel may send us a correction, and we will make it without charge or condition.

What we do not publish

No prices, no star classifications, no ratings, no booking, no affiliate links and no paid placement. We take no commission on anything. Nobody can buy an entry, buy a change to an entry or buy their way out of one.

Why there is a Casino Hotels section

Four Canadian resorts in this guide have gaming floors, and they are grouped honestly rather than hidden among the rest. What interests us there is the same as everywhere else: the resorts work round the year, and the season changes the island, the town, the riverside or the lake district around them. The gaming floor itself is not described or assessed anywhere on this site.