Freehand Chicago

We compare the reviewers of this hotel against every other hotel those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — four stars from someone who hands out fives means something very different from four stars from someone who rarely goes above three.

Those calibrated scores are then averaged, one value per reviewer, each counting equally, and the percentile is where that average falls among every hotel we score.

Global percentile

Where Freehand Chicago lands against every hotel we rank.

In-cohort percentile

The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — hotels in the same location at the same price point. A budget inn is judged against budget inns, not against the suite down the street. Ranked against Chicago · Midscale (48 hotels).

AI-adjusted percentile

The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each hotel keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 616.