Your say: Should there be a universal hotel rating system?

For those of us who travel, one of those most disappointing things on your holiday can be when you check into a hotel and it is nothing like the pictures. It was a 5 star hotel! But then you check more closely and it appears that the hotel actually self-rated and it is not, in fact, what most people would consider 5 stars.

Many in the travel industry have discussed the plausibility of a universal hotel rating system. Author Chris Elliot said, “You can’t really compare a three-star hotel in the US to a three-star hotel in Europe. In some countries, official star ratings can be a reliable guide to a hotel’s amenities, but most ratings systems are poorly or completely unregulated, rending them almost completely worthless”.

So, tell us, do you think a universal rating system would be helpful for the international traveller? Or could poorer countries suffer because they could never fit the standards of the Western world? Is the star system outdated?