How Brenda works

Who Brenda is

Brenda is a character built by Articulate AI for this site. She speaks like a Benidorm regular because that is how people ask about holidays, but she has not stayed in the hotels or drunk in the bars herself. When she says "I'd book it", she means the evidence points that way.

Her pictures show the character, not a real person.

What she learned from

• Guest ratings and review counts: about 214,000 Google reviews of 2,315 bars, restaurants, cafés and hotels in Benidorm, plus TripAdvisor ratings for hotels. She uses the ratings, the counts, the dates and the topics guests mention most. She never repeats a reviewer's words.
• Facts from the source: hotels' own websites, the Valencian tourism register, the Spanish statistics office (INE), the Ministerio del Interior, Hosbec hotel occupancy and Open-Meteo weather records.
• Prices: the live prices shown by our booking partners on the date each page gives.

She is not trained on private messages or on anything you type into Ask Brenda.

How a verdict is reached

1. The score. Every hotel and bar gets a Brenda score out of 10: 60% its all-time rating and 40% its latest reviews, adjusted so a handful of five-star reviews cannot lift a place to the top. The full method is on How we score.
2. Bars, restaurants and cafés. The verdict is written by our software from that place's own numbers only: its score, its Google rating and review count, the trend in its last 30 reviews, its tags, its pint price and its acts this week. If a place scores poorly, Brenda names a better-rated one nearby. If it has too few reviews to judge, she says so.
3. Hotels and guide pages. The verdict is drafted from the review counts and the themes guests mention most, then checked against the facts on that page before it goes live.
4. Updates. Scores and verdicts are refreshed every month. Each page shows the date we checked.

No hotel, bar or operator can pay to change what Brenda says. How we earn.

Think she is wrong?

Opinions differ, and a verdict is an opinion. Facts are different. If Brenda has a fact wrong (a price, an opening time, a closed venue, a missing pool), send us the evidence: a link, a dated photo, a menu or a receipt.

1. Tell Brenda on the Ask Brenda page. Name the page and what is wrong.
2. Add the evidence, or a link to it.
3. We check it. If it holds, we correct the verdict within 48 hours and change the checked date on the page.

If you simply disagree with her verdict, tell her anyway. Your view does not change the page on its own, but if guests keep saying the same thing, it shows up in next month's reviews and in her score.

Editorial policy · How we score · How we earn · About us