About & Methodology

What this site is

Kota Kinabalu Hotels is an independent guide to 23 hotels in and around Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. We are not owned by, and have no editorial affiliation with, any hotel listed on this site. Where we earn a commission through booking links, that relationship is disclosed separately on our Affiliate Disclosure page — it never influences which hotels we list or how we describe them.

How we research each hotel

Every hotel page is built from a combination of: the hotel’s own official website and stated policies, third-party booking and review platforms (Booking.com, KAYAK, Tripadvisor) cross-referenced against each other, and direct distance/mapping data for airport and landmark proximity. Each hotel page carries a visible “Last checked” date so you know how current the information is.

Where sources conflict — on room counts, dining availability, or exact distances — we say so directly on the page rather than picking one number arbitrarily. Where we could not independently confirm a detail, we mark it as unconfirmed rather than guessing.

Where we’ve corrected ourselves

In the course of building and re-checking this guide, we’ve caught and corrected our own errors, including:

• Horizon Hotel and Tang Dynasty Hotel were initially listed as not having a pool — both do.
• Hotel Shangri-La Kota Kinabalu has rebranded to Howard Johnson by Wyndham Kota Kinabalu City Centre — we’ve updated the listing and flagged the name change directly.
• We’ve flagged sister-property naming confusion for The Klagan Hotel vs. The Klagan Regency, Stanton Hotel vs. Stanton City Hotel, and the two Platinum Hotel branches, all of which are genuinely different buildings sharing a brand name.

We’d rather publish a visible correction than leave an error uncorrected. If you spot something inaccurate or out of date, we want to know.

What we don’t do

• We don’t fabricate urgency (“3 rooms left,” “12 people viewing”) without real inventory data behind it.
• We don’t invent review scores or quote reviews we haven’t verified.
• We don’t list a price we can’t confirm — where we don’t have a verified rate, the page says “Check rates” rather than a made-up figure.

Questions or corrections

If you’ve stayed at a hotel listed here and something on the page doesn’t match your experience, or you work for one of these properties and want to flag an inaccuracy, we want to hear about it — accuracy is the entire point of this site.