How we calculate

The sections below are the same texts that appear in the small boxes behind every “?” on the map and on the hotel pages. They are read from a single source: what stands here cannot differ from what stands there. And every threshold and factor in them — the price band, the walking speed, the pass mark of the filters, the boundaries of the quiet estimate — is taken from exactly the functions that calculate with them. A copied-out number would be the place where explanation and arithmetic quietly drift apart.

Overall score

Three axes: price — where the hotel sits in the €55–€130 band. Location — walking time to Hauptplatz plus tram access. Character — design, food nearby, not a chain.

Price and location share 80 %, and the slider above the map shifts between them. Character carries a fixed 20 % — it may tip a close call, never win one.

100 goes to the best-rated hotel in this guide at that slider position, not to an imagined perfect one. Same maths on every page, even where only a subset of hotels is shown.

As soon as a filter is active, this is not the number shown there — the surroundings score takes its place. Both run 0 to 100 and measure different things; the label beside the number says which one you are looking at.

Surroundings score

How well this hotel is served in one category, 0 to 100. Not a plain count: each place is weighted by distance — full weight at the door, almost none at the edge of the ring.

100 goes to the best-served hotel in the guide, not on this page. So 78 means the same everywhere, and a hotel keeps its value when you move from the hub to a district page.

With several filters active the number is their geometric mean: weak values weigh more, and a category with no place at all pulls it to 0. The number ranks the list, it does not gate it: only a hotel with no place at all in a chosen category drops out — and, for the “quiet” filter, anything not labelled “quiet” in the list.

This number replaces the overall score while a filter is active: with no filter, the same spot shows the hotel's overall score. It does not change, it is just not displayed — the label beside the number says which one is there.

Bar and count

Two numbers per row, and they say different things. The bar is the surroundings score 0 to 100 — it compares against the best-served hotel in the guide.

The number on the right is simply the count of places of that kind inside the chosen radius. A hotel can have many places and still a middling bar — then they sit far out.

Walking time and radius

Calculated as straight line × 1.3 at 4.5 km/h. An estimate, not a route: bridges, the Schlossberg and one-way streets are not in the model. Expect one to three minutes of drift.

The drawn circle uses the same detour factor — it is not a routed isochrone but the radius you cover in that time on average.

Drives both — the ring around the selected hotel and what the filters count as “nearby”. It stops at 20 minutes — that is how far the loaded place data reaches.

Quiet — estimated

⚠️ This is not a measurement. There is no freely usable noise data for Graz, so it is estimated from the location, out of three sources.

Road — the distance to the loudest road nearby, not the closest one: a main road at 60 m weighs more than a side street at 20 m. Beyond 250 m a road stops counting, below 50 m it counts fully. A residential street carrying a bus or tram line counts as a road too — OpenStreetMap lists Annenstraße as residential, and without that rule it would not exist for the estimate at all. At most 85 % on its own.

Rail — tram and railway, counted as ONE source: two tracks outside do not make a hotel twice as loud. At most 75 %. Night — bars and restaurants within 250 m, each weighted by proximity and a restaurant less than a bar. One bar at the door weighs more than ten at the edge of the radius. At most 55 %.

That gives a value from 0 to 1: from 0.33 it reads quiet, from 0.17 mixed, below that lively. The “quiet” filter shows exactly the hotels labelled quiet in the list.

The model does not know courtyard position, sound-proofed windows or which way your room faces — and the night often hangs on exactly that. So guest reviews were read for every hotel; the finding and its source are on the hotel’s own page. Where reviews name a source no place dataset holds — a bar inside the building, a delivery yard downstairs — the estimate is corrected by at most 0.10, and that is stated. No more than that: research may tip a close call, never a clear one.

Rank in the guide

The rank covers every hotel in the guide, never the current selection. Otherwise a district page would read “rank 1 of 1” throughout.

On a static page it uses the default weighting (price 40 %, walkability 40 %, character 20 %). On the map it moves with the slider.

The weighting slider

It shifts what counts more in the overall score: the price or the location. Same hotels, two rankings — that is what this map is actually for.

The line below names who leads right now and how far it is to the next change of lead. Character is untouched: it carries the same 20 % at every slider position.

The numbers in the buttons

The number is a probe, not a count: this many hotels would remain if you pressed THIS button now — the ones already pressed still apply.

Inside a hotel’s detail view the buttons count places in its radius instead. The label above the row says which case applies.

“Budget” and “Design” apply on top but do not feed the surroundings score — they are not a quantity of places and have no business on a proximity scale.

The places

They come from OpenStreetMap and were fetched once — no request goes out to third parties at run time. On hover you get opening hours, cuisine and address as far as OpenStreetMap knows them; where it knows nothing, the map claims nothing.

The “Places: dots / icons” switch changes the display only — selection and counts stay the same.

The data is incomplete and can be out of date: a bar nobody entered is missing here. Tram stops are counted once per stop, not per platform, and private gardens do not count as a park.

The discs on the map

Ring = budget · Fill = design · Size = overall score.

Both at once is possible and does occur: a lime ring around a blue fill is a hotel that is both cheap and a design hotel.

The strong colours of the small place dots mean something else — there each colour stands for a category.

Who makes this

This guide is compiled by Martin Pletzenauer from Zell am See — one person, not an editorial team. Same details as in the legal notice.

The work behind it is desk research, and it is meant to be checkable: coordinates geocoded and cross-checked, walking times computed from them, surroundings taken from a fixed OpenStreetMap extract, and per-house findings on noise, breakfast, cleanliness and check-in read up in guest reports and dated. Where a figure is an estimate, it says so next to the figure.

The guide earns money through booking links: if you book after clicking one, we may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. That has no influence on the ranking — the score is computed from price, walking time and character, and no hotel can buy a position in it.