Switzerland does not make its hotels earn stars. Classification is voluntary, run by the industry rather than the state, and the result is visible the moment you count: of 5,073 entries in the Swiss accommodation register we hold, 3,026 carry no star grade at all. That is 59.7%. But the more useful number is the one underneath it — because much of that 3,026 was never eligible for a star in the first place, and separating the two changes what the figure means.
Where these numbers come from. Switzerland’s accommodation data reaches us through the Open Data Hub tourism feed, which carries a classification field on every record. We hold 5,836 active Swiss records in total: 5,073 from that feed, plus 763 from Wikidata which are building records and carry no grade field whatsoever. Every figure below is computed on the 5,073 — the only Swiss rows where the question can be asked at all. Queried 17 August 2026.
Most of the register is not a hotel
The feed types every entry. Once the register is split by that type, the missing grades stop being mysterious:
The 60% headline is true of the register and misleading about hotels. Swiss classification applies to hotels and pensions. Restrict the question to the 3,266 entries typed that way and the ungraded share falls to 39.7% — still high, still the real finding, but a different claim. The 1,331 entries typed Not defined are what inflate the headline: 96.4% of them carry no grade and only 11.9% carry a photograph, while 95.4% carry a telephone number. They are name-and-phone stubs, and they are the single largest source of blankness in the file.
The grades, and the half-step in the middle
395 of the 2,047 graded entries hold a superior grade — 3 stars superior, 4 stars superior, and so on up. Superior is Swiss classification’s half-step: it marks a hotel that goes beyond the requirements of its star category without meeting the category above. The criteria belong to HotellerieSuisse, which runs the scheme; read them there rather than trusting our one-sentence summary of them.
This is worth stating plainly because it is our bug, not Switzerland’s. The parser that fills the numeric column recognises the plain grades and writes 3 or 4; it meets the superior grades, fails to recognise the pattern, and writes nothing. All 1,652 plain-star entries carry a number. All 395 superior entries do not. If you have used a star filter anywhere on this site to shortlist a Swiss hotel, it has been hiding the upgraded ones from you, and it will keep doing so until the parser is fixed.
Three superior hotels a star filter cannot see
One at each of the three levels where superior is common — 5 stars superior, 4 stars superior and 3 stars superior. All three carry a grade, a photograph and a telephone number, and not one of them carries a number in the star column.
Where superior clusters
Counting superior hotels as a share of the graded hotels in a town — not of all entries, which would let a town’s ungraded apartments drag the figure down — gives the ranking below. Only hotels and pensions are counted, and only towns holding at least 30 of them:
Geneva leads, which is not where anyone would look for it. On the graded denominator the city tops the table at 35.9%, a whisker ahead of St. Moritz — and both sit well clear of Zermatt at 27.4%. Geneva’s superior entries are weighted to the very top: nine of its hotels hold 5 stars superior, among them Hôtel Beau-Rivage on the lakefront. The Alpine resorts have the reputation; the diplomatic city has the concentration.
Ascona is the town most willing to be graded at all — only 8.6% of its hotels are ungraded, against 38.3% in Luzern. That gap has nothing to do with hotel quality. It is a gap in how consistently one local tourist board fills in a field, and it is the reason no ungraded figure in this table should be read as a judgement on a town.
One town in that table had to be reassembled before it could be counted. Davos appears in the register under eight separate names — Davos Platz, Davos Dorf, Davos Wiesen, Davos Clavadel, Davos Wolfgang, Davos Glaris, Davos Frauenkirch and Davos Monstein. Taking the largest of them alone would have shown 41 entries and hidden 32 more. Anyone counting Swiss towns out of this feed has to merge them first, and say that they did.
What we don’t know
- Not categorized has two meanings and we cannot separate them. It may mean a hotel chose not to classify, or it may mean a grade exists and was never supplied to the feed. Both land in the same 3,026 and nothing in the data tells them apart. A blank is not a hotel that failed an inspection.
- A star grade measures facilities, not pleasure. Swiss classification counts what a hotel has — room sizes, reception hours, service standards. A 2-star hotel with a superb kitchen and a view of the Matterhorn scores 2 stars, and several of the best-known places to stay in the country sit in the ungraded column.
- The register double-counts. 161 groups of entries share a name and a telephone number, and 83 of the Wikidata building records duplicate a name already in the hotel feed — Badrutt's Palace Hotel and Gstaad Palace each appear twice across the two sources. Treat every total here as entries, not as distinct businesses.
- Operating status is not a field. It leaks into the name instead: one Geneva entry is called Reopening2028: Fairmont Grand Hotel Geneva. That is the only such row in the whole Swiss file, which means hotels closed for renovation are generally not flagged at all. Telephone before you travel.
- Swiss altitude in this feed is a decoy. All 5,073 entries carry an altitude key and 5,031 of them hold zero. There is no highest-hotel-in-Switzerland figure to be had here, and any you see derived from this feed is wrong.
- No prices, no review scores, no room counts. Not one of the three exists on a Swiss row. We hold a name, a town, a type, a grade, a photograph for 68% and a telephone number for 92%.
- Photograph coverage is not a quality signal. 87.6% of hotels are photographed against 11.9% of the Not defined stubs. A hotel without a picture here has a thinner tourist-board record, and nothing else follows from it.
Sources
Swiss accommodation records via the Open Data Hub tourism feed. The classification scheme, including the superior grade, is administered by HotellerieSuisse — the authority for what each grade requires, and the place to check a current one. Building records from Wikidata; its metadata is CC0, its photographs are licensed individually. Retrieved 17 August 2026: 5,836 active Swiss records, 5,073 carrying a classification field, 3,026 of them ungraded, 395 superior. Hero photograph: Gstaad Palace, by Roland Zumbühl, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
More from the same catalogue
- Where to sleep above 2,000 metres in South Tyrol — the register that does record altitude, unlike this one.
- Mont Ventoux by bike: where to stay on each of the three roads — a French certification counted two ways, because the two answers disagreed.
- Devon and Cornwall: 673 hotel buildings and almost nothing else — the opposite problem, photographs without facts.
- Every Swiss property we hold — the destination pages behind these counts.
