About

What this is

Gametensis documents four categories of hotel — art, capsule, casino and ice — with four properties in each. It is a reference, not a marketplace. There is no booking engine, no availability search, no price comparison and no affiliate relationship with any property described here.

The four categories were chosen because each one asks something different of a building. An art hotel has to decide how art meets a guest. A capsule hotel has to make a very small volume genuinely restful. A casino hotel has to function as a full hotel with a licensed gaming floor among its facilities. An ice hotel has to be rebuilt from scratch every year and then be allowed to melt.

How properties are chosen

Selection is editorial and is made by us. A property enters the index when it illustrates its category clearly and when there is enough substance to write about without resorting to marketing language. No hotel has paid, asked, or been invited to approve its entry, and no entry can be bought.

The casino roster is fixed at four properties and is not expanded.

How entries are written

Descriptions are prose. We avoid specification tables because they flatten exactly the details that distinguish one hotel from another, and because a matched grid of fields implies a precision we would not be able to keep current. Short fact lines sit beneath each description where a plain statement is more useful than a sentence.

We restrict ourselves to general, durable, true-to-character facts: what a building is, where it stands, what it holds, roughly when it was made. We do not publish figures that would need sourcing and would go stale — rates, room counts stated to the unit, award positions, occupancy.

What this is not

• Not a booking agent, travel agency or reseller.
• Not a review site — there are no star ratings and no guest reviews here, invented or collected.
• Not a gambling site. Where a hotel holds a licensed gaming floor we note it as a facility and publish nothing further about it.
• Not sponsored. No entry, position or description has been paid for.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, we would rather know. Details for getting in touch are on the contact page.