About the itinerary

01The people behind the board

hoopschamps.com belongs to Harrah's Chester Downs Management Company, LLC, 777 Harrah's Boulevard, Chester, PA 19013. That company operates a casino venue in Chester, Pennsylvania. The venue offers no overnight rooms, which is the whole reason it is absent from a list of hotels. Our publisher owns none of the ten properties. Two shore hotels, Tropicana and Caesars, answer to Caesars Entertainment, the same group our publisher reports to, so each is marked "Sister property (same parent group)". Put simply, the publisher benefits when travellers choose this corner of the Mid-Atlantic, and you deserve to know it.

02Where the money comes from

Referral commission pays the bills. When a reader taps through to a hotel and later reserves a room, a partner network may credit us with a fee. That covers research, rewrites and hosting. Hotels do not pay to be included, and a cheque cannot lift anyone up the order. Our affiliate disclosure goes into more depth.

03How a hotel earns its place

A property qualifies only if guests can sleep on site and it lies within a sensible journey of Philadelphia, the hill country of inland Pennsylvania or the Jersey shore around Atlantic City. We then go through each official website the slow way: which room categories exist, whether there is a spa or pool, what the restaurants look like, what sits beyond the car park, and how candidly fees, parking and age limits are spelled out.

Position on the board is an editorial call about the stay as a whole. You will find no numerical grades, no quoted guest comments and no figures we were unable to check. Wherever the hotel's own information left us unsure, the entry tells you to raise the question with them.

04What the editors bring

The editors behind this guide have spent years plotting short getaways out of Philadelphia: autumn drives to the Poconos, off-season shore weekends, museum days with a suburban hotel as base. They write about rooms, settings and things to do. Anything on the casino side stays outside the brief and appears only as one neutral facility line per hotel.

05Fixing what we got wrong

Hotels refurbish towers, rename restaurants and rewrite policies. Seen a stale line? Paste the link plus whatever needs fixing into a note for contact@hoopschamps.com. An editor compares your note with the hotel's current information, amends the entry and moves the "Updated" date forward.