How listings are sourced and checked

EV Hotel Guide lists hotels in the United States and Canada that have EV charging for guests. Charging details change, and many hotels never publish them, so every listing shows how much we know about it. This page explains that, so you can decide how much to trust a listing before you book a room around it.

Where the data comes from

Charging stations. The starting point is public charging-station data: the U.S. Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC) and, for Canada, Natural Resources Canada. These databases record each station's location, plug types, charging level, network and the date it was last confirmed. We keep hotels whose stations are recorded as being at a hotel, and we remove sites that are really standalone charging stations (a Tesla Supercharger beside a motel, for example).

Hotel details. Websites, phone numbers and star ratings come from the hotel's own information and from OpenStreetMap, which we use to fill in what the charging data lacks. Contains information from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (ODbL).

Hotel websites. To help us check a listing, we look for EV-charging wording on the hotel's own website, always respecting the site's robots.txt. A mention on a hotel's website is evidence for a person to read; it is never enough, on its own, to mark a listing as checked.

You. Visitors and hotel staff tell us when something is wrong or missing, through the buttons on each listing and the contact form. Reports about listings that many people look at are looked at first.

Verified and Unverified

Verified means a person has checked the listing against evidence such as the hotel's own information and confirmed that the hotel offers EV charging, what kind, and whether it costs anything. Only Verified listings can carry the green “Free charging” badge, and the page says so.

Unverified means the listing comes from public charging-station data that was confirmed within roughly the last two years and no person has checked it yet. We show the charger details the data gives us, but we don't say whether charging is free or paid, whether it is open to non-guests, or that it is currently working. Unverified listings are labelled as such on every page where they appear.

A listing leaves the Unverified group in one of three ways: a person verifies it, a person rules out EV charging and it is removed, or the underlying station data goes out of date and we stop listing it.

How we decide charging is free

A charger is marked free only when a person has confirmed that using it costs nothing beyond being a guest: no per-kWh rate, no hourly fee, no session charge. If a hotel's chargers cost anything, however little, the hotel is listed as having paid charging. When we can't tell, the price is shown as not confirmed rather than guessed. A listing is never approved as Verified while its price is unknown.

What we can't promise

Chargers break, get blocked by other cars, and change owners, and a hotel can add or remove charging without telling anyone. Unverified listings show the date their station data was last confirmed, where we have one. Always confirm access, price and plug type with the hotel when you book, especially if you will rely on the charger to reach your next stop. See our guide to EV charging at hotels for what to ask.

Reporting a problem

Every Unverified listing has a “Does this listing look right?” control. We store your answer and a one-way scrambled value, not your IP address, used to ignore repeat clicks from the same visitor on the same day. We also keep a simple count of how many times each listing is viewed, with nothing that identifies you, so we can check the most-viewed listings first. For anything more detailed, use the contact form. Hotel staff can also sign in to ask to manage their hotel's listing; those requests are approved by us before anything changes.

How the site is funded

Some booking links are affiliate links, and the site may show advertising. Neither affects which hotels are listed or whether a hotel is marked as having free charging. Details are in the privacy policy.