Daniel sent us this one—he's asking about hotel star ratings, and why a three-star in Italy feels nothing like a three-star in the US. He's noticed Israel tends toward the Italian model, where a five-star doesn't necessarily scream over-the-top luxury. And he's got five specific questions: how ratings actually get assigned in different countries, where the star concept even came from, why three stars seems to be the lowest you ever see advertised, whether verified one-star hotels actually exist and if they come with guaranteed cockroaches, and how regulated the whole thing is. Honestly, this is one of those things you just accept until you think about it for five seconds and realize it makes no sense.
It's the illusion of standardization. You see those little gold stars on a booking site and you assume someone, somewhere, is enforcing a consistent definition. They are not. What we have instead is a global patchwork of government mandates, private inspectorates, and—in some countries—basically nothing at all.
The honor system for hotel ratings. What could go wrong.
Quite a lot, as it turns out. So let's start with the origin story, because it explains a lot about why the system is fractured. The first hotel star rating system was introduced by the Automobile Association in the UK in nineteen oh eight. They were rating roadside inns for motorists—this was the dawn of car travel, and drivers needed to know which places were reliable. The AA used a star system because stars were already associated with quality grading from things like cognac classifications.
Wait—the AA, as in the roadside breakdown people?
The very same. They started as an organization for motorists, and part of that mission was telling you where to sleep when your Model T broke down in the Cotswolds. They still rate hotels today, by the way. Their system runs from one to five stars, and they inspect annually. Here's a fun detail: in the early days, an AA inspector would show up unannounced, have a meal, stay the night, and then either hand the innkeeper a star plaque or quietly drive away without a word. No report, no explanation. You just woke up and either had a star or you didn't.
That's brutal. Imagine the anxiety of running an inn in nineteen ten, knowing that any quiet guest with a notebook might be the guy who decides your entire winter season.
The inspector's judgments were famously idiosyncratic. One early AA guide reportedly deducted points from an otherwise excellent inn because the inspector didn't like the shade of brown on the dining room wallpaper. There was no appeals process. It was essentially a one-person Yelp review with permanent consequences.
The system was arbitrary from day one. That's both reassuring and deeply depressing.
It's the founding DNA of the whole enterprise. Now, the Michelin stars people always confuse with hotel ratings—
Right, because everyone says "five-star hotel" and "Michelin-starred restaurant" in the same breath and assumes they're related.
That's a separate but parallel story. Michelin started rating restaurants in nineteen twenty-six, also for motorists—they wanted to sell tires by giving people reasons to drive places. Their logic was literally: if we make people want to drive to a charming village three hours away for a remarkable meal, they'll wear out their tires faster and buy more from us. But Michelin has never rated hotels. The hotel star concept spread from the AA model across Europe throughout the twentieth century, but here's the key thing: every country that adopted it built its own version. There was never a founding moment where everyone agreed on definitions.
It's like if every country independently decided what a volt means.
That's actually a perfect analogy. And just like electrical standards eventually harmonized—mostly—there have been attempts to harmonize hotel stars. The biggest one is the Hotelstars Union, launched in two thousand nine. It covers twenty European countries and sets common criteria. But it's voluntary, and only about fifteen thousand hotels participate out of the hundreds of thousands across those countries.
Fifteen thousand out of hundreds of thousands. So the "union" is more of a book club.
A book club where some members don't read the book, yes. And crucially, neither Italy nor Israel are members. Which brings us to how ratings actually work in different countries today, because the split is fascinating. There are basically three models. Model one: government-mandated systems where the state sets objective criteria and enforces them through inspections. That's Italy, France, Israel, India, and several others. Model two: private inspectorates that use anonymous evaluators and subjective service assessments—the big one here is Forbes Travel Guide in the US, which used to be the Mobil Travel Guide. Model three: self-declaration with minimal oversight, which is most of the US market.
Let me guess—model three is where the trouble lives.
It's where the most confusion lives, definitely. But let's go deeper on model one, because it answers the prompt's observation about Italy and Israel feeling similar. Italy's system is codified in law—specifically the Decreto Ministeriale from two thousand eight, updated in twenty fifteen. This is a government document that spells out, room by room and amenity by amenity, what each star level requires.
Give me the checklist.
A three-star hotel in Italy must have en-suite bathrooms in every room, a television in every room, and a breakfast room. The front desk must be staffed twenty-four hours. Minimum room size for a double is fourteen square meters. A five-star must have twenty-four-hour room service, a concierge, a restaurant, and at least one suite. The lobby must be a certain size. Elevators are mandatory above a certain floor count. These are not suggestions—they're legal requirements enforced by the Ministry of Tourism through regional inspectors.
A five-star in Italy is essentially a building that checks a lot of boxes, not necessarily a building that makes you feel like royalty.
And that's the core of the host's observation. Let me give you a concrete example. The Hotel Hassler in Rome is a five-star. It sits at the top of the Spanish Steps, it's been there forever, it's elegant. But if you book a standard room, you might get something that feels surprisingly compact by American luxury standards. The bathroom will be marble, but it might be a single sink. The room service menu will be extensive, but nobody's leaving a handwritten note on your pillow about tomorrow's weather. It checks every box on the Italian government's five-star list—the square footage, the elevator, the twenty-four-hour desk—but it's not trying to be the Four Seasons.
Meanwhile, a Forbes five-star in the US is a completely different animal.
Night and day. Take the Beverly Hills Hotel. A Forbes inspector there is evaluating whether the pool attendant offers to clean your sunglasses without being asked, whether room service remembers you're allergic to shellfish from a conversation two days ago, whether the turndown service positions your slippers at the exact angle you left them. None of that appears on Italy's government checklist because you can't write a law that says "staff must anticipate needs before guests articulate them.
How would you even enforce that? "Article seven, paragraph three: the concierge shall demonstrate a preternatural ability to read minds.
You'd have to train inspectors in telepathy, which is probably outside the Ministry of Tourism's budget. But this gets at something important. Israel follows a very similar model to Italy's through the Ministry of Tourism's Hotel Stars classification, updated most recently in twenty twenty. The Israeli system mandates specific square footage per room, staff-to-guest ratios, and facility types. A five-star in Tel Aviv—think the Dan Tel Aviv—has a beachfront location and large rooms and meets all the checklist items, but it might not have the personalized butler service or the opulent spa you'd find at a Forbes five-star in Beverly Hills.
Which is why someone checking into an Israeli five-star expecting the Four Seasons experience might walk away thinking "this is nice but it's not five-star nice." Except it literally is five-star—by Israel's definition.
The disconnect is between objective infrastructure ratings and subjective luxury ratings. Government systems measure what the hotel has. Private systems like Forbes measure what the hotel does. Forbes uses anonymous inspectors who stay multiple nights and evaluate on something like nine hundred criteria, most of which are service-based. They're looking for what they call "anticipatory service"—a staff member remembering your drink preference from the night before, or noticing you left a book open and placing a bookmark. That's not on any government checklist.
Because how would you even legislate "anticipatory service"? The Ministry of Tourism isn't sending inspectors to see if the concierge remembers your name.
Which is exactly why government systems don't try. They stick to what's measurable. And there's a philosophical divide here. Countries like Italy and Israel treat star ratings as consumer protection—the government is guaranteeing a minimum standard. The US, broadly, treats them as marketing tools. A hotel can call itself five stars on Expedia, and unless they're in Nevada or Louisiana—the only two states with any hotel rating laws—nobody is stopping them.
Wait, only two states have laws about this? How is that possible? We regulate the thread count on mattress tags but not whether a building can call itself a five-star hotel?
Mattress tags are federal. Hotel ratings are almost entirely unregulated at the federal level. Nevada and Louisiana. That's it. Every other state relies entirely on voluntary systems like Forbes or AAA. And AAA uses diamonds, not stars, which adds another layer of confusion—a AAA Five Diamond hotel is roughly equivalent to a Forbes five-star, but they're different programs with different criteria. The AAA inspection focuses more on physical attributes and cleanliness, Forbes leans harder into service. So even within the US, two "top-tier" ratings mean different things.
A "five-star hotel" in Nebraska might just be the owner's opinion.
Might be, and often is. I found a case a few years ago of a motel outside Omaha that listed itself as a four-star property on one of the booking platforms. The owner's rationale was that he'd installed new carpet and a flat-screen TV in every room. By his personal scale, that was four stars. By any objective standard, it was a two-star motel with fresh flooring.
Did anyone call him on it?
A few angry reviews, but no regulatory action, because there's no regulator to take action. The booking platforms don't help. Expedia, Booking dot com, Hotels dot com—they all let properties self-declare their star rating. Some platforms cross-reference with official ratings where they exist, but many don't. A twenty twenty-three study by the European Consumer Centre found that forty percent of hotels in the EU had a star rating on booking platforms that didn't match their official rating.
That's not a margin of error, that's a coin flip.
It's almost random at that point. And that brings us to the third question from the prompt: why is three stars the lowest you ever see advertised?
I've always wondered this. You see one-star reviews, but never one-star hotels. It's like the scale starts at three and everything below that is a dirty secret.
Because one and two stars are stigmatized to the point of being commercially invisible. In most countries, they exist as legal categories, but hotels that qualify at those levels almost never market themselves with stars. They rebrand as "budget," "economy," "hostel," "guesthouse," "pension"—anything that avoids the numeric label. The word "one-star" has become synonymous with "bad" in a way that's almost irreversible.
It's like how no airline calls itself a "one-star airline" even if they're basically flying buses.
The star system has a floor of three in the consumer imagination. Below that, the number becomes a warning label rather than a descriptor. In Italy, a one-star hotel legally must provide a bed, a shared bathroom, and heating. No television required, no private bathroom, no breakfast room. These properties exist—they're often small family-run pensions in rural villages—but you will almost never find them on Booking dot com with "one star" proudly displayed. They'll call themselves a "family-run guesthouse in the Tuscan hills" and let the photos do the work.
The prompt asks: are there verified one-star hotels you can actually look up? And does that guarantee cockroaches?
The answer to the cockroach question is no, it's not guaranteed—but the inspection regimes for one-star properties are minimal. In the UK, the AA still inspects one-star hotels, and they check for basic cleanliness and safety. A one-star from the AA means no en-suite bathroom, no restaurant, very basic amenities—but it should be clean. The AA's definition literally says "clean and well-maintained" is the baseline even at one star. In Japan, you get something fascinating: business hotels and capsule hotels that are often rated one or two stars by the Japan Hotel Association's voluntary system, but they're spotless. Tiny, but spotless.
Japan's whole thing is making small spaces work beautifully. I've stayed in a capsule hotel in Tokyo and it was cleaner than some four-star hotels I've been in elsewhere.
A capsule hotel in Tokyo might be one star by the checklist—no private bathroom, minimal square footage—but the experience is clean, efficient, and entirely cockroach-free. Meanwhile, in India, the Ministry of Tourism's one-star classification requires a clean bed, running water, and a reception area. No air conditioning, no television. These are often roadside lodges, and the quality varies enormously. I've read accounts of one-star properties in rural Rajasthan that were basically a concrete room with a ceiling fan and a bucket of water for washing—perfectly functional, not unsafe, but not what a Western traveler would recognize as a hotel.
One-star is a real category, but it tells you almost nothing useful without knowing the country and the inspection regime. A one-star in Tokyo is a pod with a reading light and impeccable hygiene. A one-star in rural India might be an adventure.
Which is the theme of this entire episode, really. The star rating is a poor proxy for quality. A twenty twenty-three study—the same European Consumer Centre one I mentioned—found that user reviews on TripAdvisor and Google were significantly more predictive of actual experience than official star ratings.
That's the part where the whole system starts to feel like a relic. Stars made sense when you were choosing a hotel from a printed guidebook in nineteen seventy-two and you needed someone to have done the legwork. Now you have five hundred reviews with photos from last week.
Yet the stars persist, because they're convenient shorthand and because the industry has built decades of branding around them. There's a status element too—hotels fight to keep their stars because losing one is a reputational hit, even if the criteria are arbitrary. In Italy, a hotel that loses its fifth star can become a local news story. I remember reading about a hotel in Florence that was downgraded from five to four stars in twenty nineteen because their elevator was too slow to meet the updated requirements. Lost a star. Front-page news in the local paper.
A slow elevator cost them a star? That's the most Italian thing I've ever heard. Was it a genuinely slow elevator or was the inspector having a bad day?
The regulation specified a maximum wait time—I think it was forty seconds—and this elevator averaged closer to fifty during peak hours. The hotel argued that the historic nature of the building made a faster elevator impossible without structural changes that the heritage authority wouldn't approve. The Ministry of Tourism said the regulation doesn't have a heritage exemption. The hotel lost the star, and their booking rates dropped eleven percent the following quarter.
For a slow elevator. Meanwhile, a motel in Nebraska can call itself five stars because the owner bought a waffle maker for the breakfast nook.
That's the asymmetry in a nutshell. So let's talk regulation, because the prompt's last question is how regulated this all is, and you've already hinted at the answer being "wildly uneven.
I'm guessing the answer is "it depends entirely on where you're standing.
The short answer: highly regulated in some countries, barely regulated in others, and actively misleading in a few. At the high-regulation end, you have Italy, France, Israel, India, and several other countries where the government inspects and certifies. France's system is particularly intense—it's run by the national tourism development agency, Atout France, and involves regular inspections with hundreds of criteria. French inspectors will measure room dimensions with a laser, test water pressure, count the number of hangers in the closet. It's extremely thorough.
Of course the French would laser-measure the closet.
They take this very seriously. At the low-regulation end, you have the United States, Canada, and Australia, where there's essentially no government involvement at the federal level. Canada doesn't even have a national star rating system—they rely on a patchwork of provincial programs and the Canada Select system, which is voluntary and uses a completely different scale. Australia uses AAA Tourism's star system, also voluntary.
The Hotelstars Union you mentioned earlier—that's an attempt to bridge the gap?
It is, but it's a partial bridge. The union harmonizes criteria across twenty European countries—mostly in central and northern Europe. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the Baltic states, and so on. They have a common catalog of criteria: a five-star must have a minimum room size of twenty-six square meters for a double, a minibar, a safe, twenty-four-hour reception, and so on. But membership is voluntary, and the big Mediterranean tourism markets—Italy, Spain, France—never joined. Neither did the UK.
The countries people actually associate with European tourism aren't in the European hotel rating union.
Which is almost poetic in its dysfunction. The Hotelstars Union covers about fifteen thousand hotels. Europe has hundreds of thousands of hotels. It's a noble effort that simply doesn't have the scale to reshape traveler expectations. It's like having a standardized electrical outlet that only works in Latvia and Slovakia.
In the US, the only government involvement is at the state level in Nevada and Louisiana. What do those laws actually do?
They require hotels to display their official rating and prohibit false advertising of star levels. But here's the catch—the ratings themselves still come from private organizations like AAA or Forbes. The state just enforces honest display of whatever rating the hotel has earned. It's not like Nevada has its own government inspectors evaluating thread count.
It's truth-in-advertising law, not a rating system.
And that's the ceiling of US regulation on this. Every other state, a hotel can wake up and decide it's five stars, and no government agency will knock on the door.
That almost feels like a metaphor for something broader about American consumer protection, but I'll resist the tangent.
I'll take it. The philosophical difference is real. European systems tend to view star ratings as a form of consumer protection—the government is certifying that you're getting what you paid for. The American approach treats them as marketing claims, and the remedy for false claims is lawsuits, not inspections.
If I'm booking a hotel internationally and I want to know what the stars actually mean, what's the practical move? Walk me through the playbook.
Look up the country's rating system before you book. Italy's Ministry of Tourism publishes the full criteria online. Israel's Ministry of Tourism has the Hotel Stars classification document publicly available. Compare the checklist to your expectations. If you need a private bathroom and twenty-four-hour reception, check whether those are required at the star level you're considering.
That's a lot of homework for booking a hotel. I'm usually doing this at eleven PM on my phone while half-watching a show.
It is, which is why the smarter shortcut is to ignore stars entirely and filter by user review score. On Booking dot com, filter for an eight-point-zero or above. On TripAdvisor, read the recent reviews and look for specifics—cleanliness, noise, service quality. A hotel with a four-point-eight review average and three stars is almost certainly a better experience than a hotel with a three-point-five average and five stars.
The wisdom of crowds beats the wisdom of bureaucrats.
In this specific case, yes. The crowd is updating its assessment daily. The government inspector came by in twenty nineteen and checked if the minibar was there. The crowd was there last night and can tell you the minibar was empty and the elevator is still slow.
Now I'm curious about the one-star tourism angle, because the prompt asked if you can look these places up. I've actually poked around this before—you can find one-star hotels on Google Maps if you search specifically for them. They're often in rural areas or developing countries. Some are grim. Some are just a bed and a sink and a lock on the door, and they're perfectly fine for what they are.
The key variable is what the country's baseline inspection covers. In a country with strong public health enforcement, even a one-star will be hygienic. In a country with weak enforcement, a one-star might be unsafe. The star rating itself doesn't tell you which situation you're in.
Which circles back to the original observation—the system creates an illusion of comparability that doesn't exist. You see three stars in Rome and three stars in Chicago and your brain assumes equivalence, but they were generated by completely different processes measuring completely different things.
This is where the history matters. The AA created star ratings for British motorists driving around Britain. The system was never designed for cross-border comparison. It got globalized through tourism marketing without ever being globally standardized. It's like if every country used the same word for "breakfast" but it meant completely different foods, and you just had to discover that empirically.
The continental breakfast of regulatory frameworks.
Okay, now you're just enjoying yourself.
I am, but I'm also annoyed by this. I've definitely booked hotels based on stars and been confused by what I got. I remember booking a "four-star" in Lisbon once that turned out to be a converted apartment building with no elevator and a reception desk that was just someone's aunt sitting in a folding chair from nine to five. It was charming, actually—great location, clean room—but it was not a four-star by any definition I understood.
That's the thing—most people probably don't even realize the system is fractured. They assume stars are stars. Your Lisbon hotel was probably self-rated as four stars on the booking platform, and the Portuguese government's official rating—if it even had one—might have been completely different.
Which makes the forty percent mismatch finding from the European Consumer Centre study so damning. Nearly half the hotels in Europe are showing a star rating on booking sites that doesn't match their official government rating. That's not a minor discrepancy—that's a systemic failure.
The booking platforms have no incentive to fix it, because confusion probably drives more bookings to the properties that inflate their ratings.
There's definitely an asymmetry there. A hotel that self-rates as four stars when it's officially a three-star gets more clicks. The platform gets its commission either way. The only loser is the traveler who shows up expecting a four-star experience. And by the time you realize the discrepancy, you've already checked in and the platform has already been paid.
The incentives are misaligned at every level. The hotel wants to inflate, the platform benefits from the inflation, and the only check on the system is the traveler's willingness to leave a bad review—which happens after the transaction is complete.
What's the future here? Are we stuck with this forever, or is anything changing?
There are a couple of developments worth watching. As of twenty twenty-six, the EU is considering mandatory star rating disclosure for all online listings—meaning platforms would be required to show the official government rating alongside any self-declared rating. That would be a significant shift, but enforcement is probably years away and would face enormous industry pushback.
Hotels don't want the asterisk next to their inflated stars.
They absolutely do not. Imagine being a hotel that's been marketing itself as four stars for a decade, and suddenly the booking site has to display "Official Rating: Two Stars" right next to your listing. That's an existential threat to a lot of properties. The other development is AI-powered review analysis. Tools that can read thousands of reviews and extract patterns—"guests consistently mention thin walls" or "breakfast quality declined after management changed"—are getting better. That might eventually replace star ratings as the primary quality signal. Why rely on a five-year-old government inspection when an AI can tell you what three hundred guests said last month?
The blockchain people have probably proposed something too, right? Verified immutable ratings or whatever?
They have, and I'm skeptical. A blockchain-based verified rating system sounds elegant in theory—tamper-proof inspections recorded on a distributed ledger—but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that different cultures have different definitions of quality. A blockchain can't tell you whether a Japanese business hotel or an Italian pension is "better." It can only verify that each one met its local criteria, which we can already do with government databases.
The blockchain is a solution looking for a problem, and this problem is too squishy for it. You can't decentralize the question of whether a hotel feels luxurious.
Hotel quality is inherently subjective. Even within a single country, two travelers can have wildly different experiences at the same property based on which room they got, which staff member was on shift, or what their expectations were walking in. A family with young children and a business traveler on a tight schedule are effectively staying in different hotels even if they're in the same building.
The actionable takeaway for listeners is basically: stars are a rough starting point at best, actively misleading at worst, and you should build your own quality assessment from recent reviews and photos.
If you're curious about the one-star world, go looking. Search "one-star hotel" plus a country name on Google Maps. You'll find places that are legally classified as one-star. Some are grim, some are charming, some are just a bed and a prayer. But they're real, and they're often more interesting than the homogenized three-star chains.
The worst-rated tourism episode we did touched on this—there's a whole subculture of people who deliberately seek out the bottom of the rating scale. It's almost a sport. How bad can it get while still being technically a hotel?
That subculture has produced some of the most entertaining travel writing I've ever read. There's a guy who documented staying at every one-star hotel in London—there are only about a dozen of them—and the write-ups are incredible. Some were depressing, but a few were run by lovely people who just couldn't afford the renovations needed to climb the star ladder. One place had been family-run since the nineteen fifties and the owner had refused to install en-suite bathrooms because she thought sharing a bathroom "encouraged guests to be neighborly.
That's either heartwarming or horrifying depending on how you feel about small talk with strangers while you're holding a toothbrush.
I think it's both. But for the average traveler who just wants a clean room and a decent night's sleep, the advice is simple: ignore the stars, read the reviews, and if you're booking internationally, spend two minutes checking what that country's star system actually measures.
Which is advice that feels obvious once you say it, but I'd bet most people have never done it. I hadn't done it until researching this episode.
Because the system is designed to make you not think about it. Stars are visual shorthand for "someone authoritative has vouched for this place." The entire tourism industry benefits from you not asking who that someone is.
Covering the covers.
I don't know what that means, but I agree.
It means the thing that's supposed to provide transparency is itself opaque. The rating system needs a rating system. Who rates the raters?
Now we've gone meta. But you're right—that's exactly what's happening. The stars are supposed to be the shortcut, but you need a shortcut to understand the shortcut. It's shortcuts all the way down.
To wrap this around to the prompt's specific observations: yes, Israel does tend toward the Italian model. Both use government checklists focused on infrastructure and amenities rather than subjective service quality. A five-star in either country will reliably have certain physical features—large rooms, multiple dining options, twenty-four-hour service—but may not deliver the "anticipatory service" that defines a Forbes five-star. And if you're someone who doesn't stay in five-star hotels, the difference you're supposed to notice is mostly about space, privacy, and the number of people whose job it is to solve your problems before you know you have them.
That last part is the real luxury differentiator, by the way. At a three-star, you have a problem and you go to the front desk to ask for help. At a true five-star—Forbes-style, not checklist-style—someone notices you look slightly confused in the lobby and resolves the issue before you've fully articulated it to yourself.
Which sounds either wonderful or unnerving depending on your personality. I think I'd find it unnerving. I don't want someone noticing I'm confused before I've noticed I'm confused.
I think that's exactly right. Some people find that level of attention claustrophobic. Others find it worth every penny. Neither is wrong—but the star system doesn't tell you which version of five-star you're booking. You might want the checklist five-star and accidentally book the anticipatory-service five-star, or vice versa, and either way you're paying a premium for an experience that doesn't match your preferences.
On the one-star question: they exist, they're findable, and cockroaches are not guaranteed but also not impossible. It depends entirely on the country's baseline health and safety enforcement.
Japan: one-star, no cockroaches. Certain parts of rural India: one-star, maybe bring your own mosquito net. The star rating tells you nothing about which scenario you're walking into. The country tells you everything.
The star rating is basically a national language that we all pretend is Esperanto.
That might be the cleanest summary of the entire episode. Hotel stars are a national language masquerading as a universal one. And the travelers who get burned are the ones who don't realize they need a translation.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the eighteen forties, an Italian missionary in Eritrea named Giovanni Stella built a mechanical computer out of olive wood and camel-bone gears to calculate the liturgical calendar for the local Coptic church. The device could track moveable feasts for up to forty years without adjustment, but it was destroyed in a termite infestation in eighteen fifty-two and exists now only as a single ink sketch in a monastery archive in Asmara.
A calendar computer eaten by termites. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. Something about the best-laid plans of mice and missionary-engineers.
Camel-bone gears. I have questions, but I'm not sure I want answers. How do you even source camel bone in eighteen-forties Eritrea? Was there a dedicated camel-bone supplier? Did he have to process it himself?
I'm picturing him at a market, haggling over a sack of camel vertebrae while the locals wonder what this strange Italian is up to.
Then termites undo forty years of feast calculations. The universe has a sense of humor.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen—it helps. Next time you book a hotel, check the country's rating criteria and send us your weirdest star-rating story. We'll be here.
