The tourism industry, as a dynamically growing socio-economic sector, directly influences on hospitality. Such demand requires the hotel industry to be organized in order to assure standardization and promise qualitative service to the guests.

This research-oriented non-commissioned thesis strives to analyse hotel classification systems and critically discover customers’ attitude towards them, as well as to give a suggestion of how potential alternative tool could look like.

The theoretical framework focuses on the exploration of various classification systems and finds out there is no unity of geographical application, assessment methods nor criteria which mainly focus on the evaluation of tangible aspects. Systems’ relevancy is also questioned due to consumers relying more on word-of-mouth. Also, the credibility of evaluation is doubted, since service is intangible & inseparable in its nature and assessment significantly varies on one’s perception & expectations, therefore the concept of service quality is highly subjective.

The research was conducted through the quantitative method with non-probability sampling. Its results demonstrated that hotel category is an influential factor for the hotel decision-making process. However, consumers are unsure of what evaluation stands for and how in general systems operate. In addition, customer behaviour is changing and travellers prefer online ratings with user-generated content which they find more trustworthy. On the flip side, reviews sometimes miss context and judgment, as well as not always reflect enough about the reviewer so that potential consumers could trust him/her. For this reason, the solution is to provide customers with more credible and personality-reflecting evaluation from travellers with alike backgrounds, e.g. culture & travel experience, and needs, e.g. purpose of stay & travel mode. By receiving assessment based on not only others’ perception of service but own expectations, customers would get more reliable information and make a better choice, so the overall satisfaction from the experience would be more probable.