About The Properties We Recommend

Every property that Karen Brown recommends is one that a member of the Karen Brown team has personally visited and enjoyed. Our recommendations are written with the belief that where you lay your head each night makes the difference between a good and a great vacation. The wonderful hosts as well as other guests that you will meet at these incredible properties will enrich and enhance your travel experiences. Our recommendations reflect an incredible range of properties that include mills, castles, pubs, inns, farms, houses, chateaux, villas, cottages, palaces, hotels—from the simplest to the most divinely luxurious. We see many properties, compare and then make the selection. Since every property is unique it makes the selection process a bit more complicated, but, basically we evaluate them based on their “Quality, Welcome and Charm”. Location, cleanliness, hospitality and value also play an enormous part and influence our decision. Also, by the nature of a selective listing, and the fact that we are looking for the “best” in terms of what a particular property offers, even though value is important, we are not looking for simply the best price or budget. We believe you, the Karen Brown Traveler, would want to pay a little more, knowing you are getting the best for your expenditure. As a result, Karen Brown recommendations tend to be moderate to expensive in their rates.

As a final editorial note, please know there is no charge to be included in a Karen Brown guide. Our guides are not “paid advertisements” and we do not want “payment” to influence or govern our selection. Editorial is by a Karen Brown author with a write up that we feel is honest and candid in its appraisal. As we have said so often over the years, if a property is recommended in our guide, we love it – it is just that each property is unique; not everything is always considered “perfect” and we want you, the Traveler, to make your selection based on your personal preference with our honest appraisal as a source of reference.

We do have a charge if a property wants to be featured on our website. Only properties recommended in a Karen Brown Guide or a property personally inspected by a Karen Brown researcher are eligible to be featured and branded as a “Karen Brown Recommendation”. For an annual fee they receive an enhanced online presence which includes color photos of their property, direct links to their website, email address and online booking service (where appropriate), and inclusion in the individual itineraries as ordered from our online store.

In addition, Karen Brown's World provides you with information about quality places to stay that are not in our guides. We include properties from hotel associations whose selection criteria we trust.