What do we look for in an assessment?

Every participant in the National Quality Assessment Scheme (NQAS) will be visited by one of our professional assessors.  Each property will be assessed on three levels:

1) Minimum Entry Requirements (MER) - Each property must meet the minimum requirements in its sector. For example, a hotel must be licensed and all bedrooms must be en-suite or have private bathrooms.  Self-catering accommodation must have self-contained units i.e. no shared facilities.

2) Facilities and Services - When the assessor visits hotels and guest accommodation they do not just assess the facilities, they check several different areas which include:

Cleanliness
Service and hospitality
Bedrooms
Bathrooms
Food/breakfast
Public areas
   
Each of these areas will be scored as either:

Adequate
Quite good
Good
Very Good
Excellent     

Service and hospitality is a very important aspect of any guest's stay in a hotel or B&B. It is about the little things you do to make your guests' stay that bit more special.  Your bedrooms and bathrooms may be of modest quality, but if your hospitality and your breakfast are exceptional this will pull up your overall score and star rating.

3) Quality Scores - The star rating you achieve depends on the scores you receive for each area.  For example, to achieve four star, most of the scores in your assessment must be Very Good, whereas a three star property would need to achieve an average of Good.

View the standards booklets for each scheme.