Flickr/Imagine Communications and Jennifer Polland/Business Insider
To create it, we aggregated four notable hotel rankings: Travel + Leisure's World's Best Hotel Awards, Condé Nast Traveler's Top 100 Hotels & Resorts (part of its annual Reader's Choice Awards), TripAdvisor's Top 25 Hotels In The World (part of its annual Travelers' Choice Awards), and the Fodor's 100 Hotel Awards.
We gave each hotel a numerical rating based on how many
For
For TripAdvisor's list, which was ranked out of 25, we calculated the score with this formula: 25-X (hotel ranking) + 1 /25.
Each time a hotel appeared on the Fodor's list, we gave it a score of 0.25, since the hotels on that list were not ranked.
Because we felt that Travel + Leisure and Condé Nast Traveler were more prestigious rankings, we weighted those rankings more heavily.
We then tallied up the scores to create the final ranking.
Here is the spreadsheet showing our calculations (click to enlarge):