Let the world be your Oyster.com

Have you ever checked into a hotel, looked around at the lack of amenities and view, and said to yourself: Man, this is nothing like the brochure.

Yeah, many of those pictures that you see from a hotel’s web site are taken to make the finest impression on a potential guest, and some of them are probably airbrushed. These are the pictures that end up on hotels.com and other online reservation sites, and the few paragraphs of description they give on the hotel or resort is too good to be true.

Don’t even get me started on the description of the amenities! Actually, I’m going to get started on them. I used to work at a hotel, and usually the amenities that we had were whatever was working when the guest was there.

Most travel sites that talk about the hotel would just say pool on their amenities description, and then you get there, and discover you shouldn’t have packed your swimsuit at all. Haven’t you ever stayed at a hotel that said it had a pool, and then you find out that the pool is outdoors and not available during certain seasons?

I would imagine that problems like this are what inspired the creators of Oyster Hotel Reviews to create a site devoted to hotels. This isn’t like the other sites where the basic information of the hotel is listed, and the reviewers just looked up the hotel website as their main source. At best, these sites talked to the people who work there, and filled in the gaps to make content. Sure, the best foot is put forward, but it isn’t always the foot that the guest gets.

No, writers on oyster.com have physically stayed at this hotel, and all their reporting is based on actual experience. Oyster.com reporters check in just like any other guest, and they don’t tell anyone in the hotel who they are working for, so they are treated as actual guests, not V.I.P.s.

The end result is an unbiased report of the hotel stay, complete with amenities, is actually like. A typical review starts with Pros and Cons, and then sections about the Service, the Location, the Rooms, the Features, the Cleanliness, and the Food. Then everything all adds up to the Bottom Line to tell the end-user how good their stay actually was.

In addition to the content, Oyster Hotel Reviews features lots of photos of the place that are taken by high resolution digital cameras, and are not airbrushed in any way. So while the hotel’s site has a perfect shot of the beach at sunset, Oyster Hotel Reviews has a shot of the beach on normal conditions.

The photo feature is just one tab on each Oyster Hotel Reviews entries. Another one is the map feature that will show directions to the hotel, but orange pinpoints for other hotels that Oyster Hotel Reviews has reviewed.

In short, I believe that Oyster Hotel Reviews is going to change the online travel industry. Considering that sites like Expedia, Cheaptickets, and Travelocity are a dime a dozen, Oyster Hotel Reviews has something that they don’t have: a chance to see what the hotel is actually like. It will decrease the amount of unpleasant surprises that arise on trips, which is what all travelers want.

Oyster.com