Latin America: what most people book gets the worse grade

Four Latin American lists, measured data for eighty entries. Among the "best ten" entries there is not a single score below 9.0; among the most booked, twenty-five out of forty are, and getting onto the list in Argentina takes eighteen times fewer reviews than in Costa Rica.

Beyond Europe · October 2026

We collected the glamping selections of four countries by machine: Brazil, Costa Rica, Chile and Argentina. Twenty accommodations per country, eighty entries in total, each with name, type label, score and review count.

On every page two lists of ten run one below the other: "The 10 best luxury campsites", and below it those "most frequently booked this month". In our Asian article the topic was the sample size of the two lists. Here it is something else: the two lists do not follow each other in rank order; they stand opposed.

The most booked places get a worse grade

The median score of the forty "best ten" entries is 9.5, and not a single entry is below 9.0; the lowest score is exactly 9.0. The median of the forty most booked entries is 8.85, and twenty-five of them are below 9.0, the lowest being 7.8.

This is not one country's outlier. It stands the same way in all four:

The spread of the scores is also larger on the most booked lists, in all four countries: in Costa Rica 0.47 instead of 0.25, in Argentina 0.54 instead of 0.30. So there the midpoint is not only lower; the field also falls apart.

What we claim from this, and what we do not. We claim that the two lists rank two different measures, and that traffic is not an increasing function of the rating. We do not claim that the much booked places are worse. Among the busy entries there are hostels, large capacity hotels and campsites, where the clientele is different and there are more reviewers. What is a usable finding, however, is that visibility and a good grade are two separate tracks here, and getting onto one does not help onto the other.

The price of getting onto the list differs eighteenfold by country

The guest count behind the "best ten" list is not a question of the continent but of the country. Median review count on the four best lists:

In Argentina 16.5, in Costa Rica 299. The same page family, the same section title, the same retrieval day, and an eighteenfold difference in how many guests' opinions it takes to get in.

The small sample is present here just as in the Asian article: of the forty "best ten" entries, fourteen are below 20 reviews, and three entries have an average of ten from five and seven reviews respectively. Their distribution by country, however, is telling: Brazil has 5 such entries, Argentina 5, Chile 4, Costa Rica none. The smallest entry on the Costa Rican best list starts at 123 reviews.

This is the most directly usable finding of this article. It is not that "in Latin America you need this many reviews"; it is that on the same continent there is a country where five guests can get you into a national selection, and one where the entry fee is three hundred. The difference is not set by geography but by how well trodden the destination is.

A third of the Chilean list stands in one settlement

The concentration of settlements makes this measurable. The type label names the locality for every entry, so one can count how many different settlements the twenty entries fall on:

So in Chile and Costa Rica a single locality supplies close to a third of the entire national selection. And this is where the two findings connect: in these dense localities the score is lower, not higher. The median score of the seven San Pedro de Atacama entries is 8.8, that of the six La Fortuna entries 9.05, while the median of their own countries' best lists is 9.6 and 9.35. The review count, on the other hand, is high: 531 and 452.5.

In other words, the built up glamping destination produces traffic, not satisfaction. Many neighbours do not lift the grade.

The word that does not appear in Brazil

The recurring words in the names separate by country. The word "domo", the Spanish name of the geodesic dome, appears in the names of seven entries: four in Argentina, two in Chile, one in Costa Rica. Among the twenty Brazilian names, not one. There the names are built on other words: "cabana" in four, "pousada" in three, "chalés" in two.

More striking still: entries that call themselves by the word "glamping" number eight in Costa Rica, eight in Argentina, six in Chile, and zero among the twenty Brazilian names. On the list of the largest country examined, the name of the category does not appear in the name of a single accommodation, while the page classifies all of them as luxury campsites.

The label, incidentally, has the same structure for all eighty entries: "Luxuskemping", the Hungarian edition's label for luxury campsite, plus the name of the settlement. So the type label does not allow conclusions about the form of the accommodation, only about which selection it got into. The names confirm this: ten entries have "hostel" in their name, and eight of these are on the most booked lists, and in Costa Rica eight names contain the word "hotel".

Two lists, but not eighty places

A methodological warning that corrects our own earlier assumption. In the Asian article we wrote that the entries of the two lists are not the same. On the four Latin American pages six entries appear on both lists, with identical URL, identical score and identical review count: one in Brazil, one in Chile, two in Costa Rica, two in Argentina.

So whoever adds up the two lists of ten gets not eighty but seventy-four different places. Six entries would be counted twice. It is a small number, but exactly the kind of error that quietly inflates a supply estimate.

What can be taken from this

1. Traffic and rating are separate axes. Across eighty entries the median of the most booked is 0.65 points lower. Anyone starting from the assumption that a good grade brings bookings by itself will find no evidence for it here.
2. The entry fee is set by the destination, not the continent. The difference between four neighbouring countries lies between sixteen and three hundred reviews.
3. A dense destination is not better, only busier. Where a third of the list falls on one locality, the median score is below the national one.
4. Adding two lists together duplicates. Six entries of the eighty appear on both.

Sources, and what CANNOT be claimed from them

• Booking.com national glamping selections: `booking.com/glamping/country/br.html`, and the pages of the same title for `cr`, `cl` and `ar`. Retrieved 2026-10-09, in the Hungarian language edition.
• We collected the data from the four pages by machine processing, twenty entries per country, eighty rows in total. We re-measured the section titles and the assignment to the two lists for all four countries. The medians, spreads and counts in the article were recalculated from the saved collection, not from reading.
• The page size was between 838 and 875 kilobytes for all four, so a real accommodation list came back, not a bot check window.

What these pages do NOT tell us: how many glamping accommodations there are in these countries, how big the market is, what the average price, occupancy or seasonality is. They are edited selections of ten items, not supply inventories, and not market size. On these four pages we did not measure price at all, so not a single figure on Latin American price levels appears in this article.

And what cannot be claimed about the entries: a row is not the same as an operator. We do not know how many entries have the same company, a multi-site player or an intermediary behind them, so we read neither a number of players nor a number of competitors out of them.

On the scores: the averages above 9 are not the market's averages but those of the places taken into the selection, in fourteen of forty cases with a review count below twenty. From this we infer neither a national standard nor a trend. That the medians of the two lists differ this way is a finding valid for these eighty entries and for this one retrieval day.