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The best bathhouse on earth is 125th by Google stars

3,888 bathing venues with 500+ Google reviews: where the world’s 100 best actually sit on the star scale.

October 2026

In early October Pieter Levels posted screenshots of booking-site rating filters on X: Airbnb’s scale now runs from 4.5 to 5.0. The post drew two million views within a week. The pattern was measured years before that post: 95% of six hundred thousand Airbnb listings sat at 4.5 stars or above, while the average hotel on TripAdvisor showed 3.8 (Zervas, Proserpio and Byers, 2021). We wanted to know what the same stars do on Google Maps, where we had the data to check.

Building The World’s 100 Best Saunas & Baths left us with a displayed rating for every serious bathing venue on the planet: 3,888 saunas, thermal baths, hammams, onsen and hot springs across 76 countries, every one with at least 500 Google reviews. At first glance Google looks sober next to Airbnb. The median venue displays 4.2 stars, and only 28 of the 3,888 display a straight 5.0. The distribution is a hump centred just above 4.

Then we looked up where our own top 100 lands on that scale. Hvammsvík Hot Springs, N° 1 of 100, displays 4.8. 124 venues display more, and exactly one of them is in the top 100 (Banya Forrest in Dubai, N° 85). Seventeen of the world’s 100 best display 4.3 or less; 1,224 venues display more than 4.3. Ordered by Google stars, the best bathing venue on earth comes 125th, or 233rd if the 108 other venues at 4.8 sort ahead of it.

3.5 or less: 64 venues ≤3.5 3.6: 72 venues 3.7: 177 venues 3.8: 308 venues 3.9: 392 venues 4.0: 452 venues 4.0 4.1: 432 venues 4.1: 3 of the 100 best3 4.2: 398 venues 4.2: 3 of the 100 best3 4.3: 369 venues 4.3: 11 of the 100 best11 4.4: 367 venues 4.4: 19 of the 100 best19 4.5: 279 venues 4.5: 17 of the 100 best17 4.5 4.6: 199 venues 4.6: 23 of the 100 best23 4.7: 146 venues 4.7: 16 of the 100 best16 4.8: 109 venues 4.8: 7 of the 100 best7 4.9: 96 venues 4.9: 1 of the 100 best1 5.0: 28 venues 5.0 452 109 96 28 3,888 bathing venues with 500+ reviews, by displayed Google rating Where the world’s 100 best sit 124 venues above 4.8
Displayed Google ratings, read October 2026. Gold: the ratings of the 100 ranked venues.

Who tops the star scale instead

The 124 venues above 4.8 are small places with devoted regulars: 44 of them are hammams, their median review count is 851 against the pool’s 1,156, and 23 of them are in Turkey. A neighbourhood hammam earns its 4.9 honestly. The star records how a visit compared with what the visitor expected, and regulars know exactly what they are getting.

The star also changes meaning at every border. The median bathing venue in Brazil displays 4.7; in Japan, 4.0. Hammams as a class sit at a median 4.6, bathhouses at 4.0. Sort the planet by stars and the top 100 fills with 20 Turkish and 7 Brazilian entries; Germany, which holds 19 places on our list, keeps one, and Iceland none. Japanese reviewers are the hardest graders in the data (1,816 venues, median 4.0), and Japan still holds 11 places in our top 100, second only to Germany.

Our list is ranked from the text of the reviews; the displayed star plays no part in it. Independence and corrections are on the About page.

Counted

The candidate pool behind Saunas & Baths 2026: Google Maps bathing venues swept in every country, 24,509 listings with 500 or more reviews, 3,888 of them public bathing venues (day entry, bathing as the main purpose). Displayed ratings read October 2026. Airbnb and TripAdvisor figures are from the sources below.

  1. G. Zervas, D. Proserpio, J. W. Byers: A first look at online reputation on Airbnb, where every stay is above average. Marketing Letters 32, 2021.
  2. Pieter Levels (@levelsio) on X, 5 October 2026.

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