There are two different types of hotel reviews: user reviews and professional reviews from travel journalists. When choosing a hotel, it can be helpful to evaluate both. TripAdvisor has long been the leader of the pack when it comes to providing a database of user reviews for every hotel out there. Oyster Hotel Reviews aims to provide consumers with qualified professional reviews of hotels around the world, hoping to compete with the likes of Frommers, Fodors, Conde Nast Traveler and others. Oyster’s reviews take on a longer, more magazine-like form, and are all written by a staff of full-time journalists who travel to each hotel reviewed.
There’s no doubt that Oyster’s actual reviews are comprehensive. Reviews include a snapshot summary that lists detailed pros and cons of each hotel, and extensive descriptions on the scene, service, location, features, activities, food and drinks for hotels. Because the review is able to be so lengthy, the details given about the hotel are ones that you wouldn’t normally find on other review sites, such as the thread count of the sheets on the beds or which celebs have stayed there. Each review also includes photos from when the reporter stayed in the hotel (not the fancy photos pulled from the hotel’s website), a map with nearby hotels, and user comments/reviews.
Currently, Oyster, which launches in beta tomorrow, only provides reviews for hotels in Aruba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Miami and plans to add New York City and Las Vegas in the near future. These lack of options are no doubt limiting and even in the current coverage areas, not every hotel is listed. For example, in Jamaica, there are only 40 hotels listed for the entire country. TripAdvisor lists over 300 hotels, in addition to lists of vacation rentals and B&Bs.
To date, Oyster has raised $6.4 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Accelerator Ventures and angel investors in March 2008 and plans to raise a Series B round in the near future. The co-founder of Oyster Hotel Reviews, Elie Seidman, says Oyster will make money off of traditional CPM based ads from relevant partners (Jamaica’s tourism board, airlines etc.). Seidman says the site will also generated revenue from leads to bookings sites like Orbitz, Hotels.com and Expedia. On Oyster, you can click to check availability of a hotel for a given date and will be given the choice to check Expedia, Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Orbitz. Each time a user books through one of these engines from a lead created by Oysters, the site gets a cut.
The online travel industry has a whole is incredibly crowded—and there are many services out there that provide reviews of hotels including TripAdvisor, Fodors, Frommers and TripKick. I think the comprehensive, journalistic, unbiased style of Oyster’s reviews are certainly useful, but the startup will need to scale its number of reviews and coverage areas to be a serious competitor.
Very cool and if executed well, would be very helpful, but my first thought and concern would be that the reviewers have a direct stake in the review. You could say that about anything in the journalism space, but I feel the travel industry could be very susceptible to that kind of problem.
Hopefully they’ll have someway to view disclosures and deal with that kind of concern.
Hi Hunter -
Thanks. We cover some of this in our FAQ. http://www.oyst....com/about/faq/
I very much agree with you on this issue and it was actually a big part of what motivated us to start Oyster Hotel Reviews. We pay our own way – entirely. We pay for the night in the hotel, the airfare, our meals, etc..
Elie
I GUESS HOTELS.COM RATING SYSTEM SUCKS..NOW WHAT THE HECK DO I DO????
I think they should invite few bloggers rather than media writers to write reviews and provide them lucrative travels package.
It’s called web 2.0, where we – the people – contribute to web sites created by other people.
Not really news or have I just missed something here?
Looks very cool simple and informative.
It appears, that Oyster is trying to be a one-stop answer for a traveler’s query about Hotels in Aruba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Miami.
It will slowly increase its reach throughout North America and then try to grab journalists all over the world to Give it the final touches of a great online Hotel-guide.
Nice domain by the way! If only more start-ups realized that building off of a nice domain is a shortcut to success.
It’s a pretty clean website, nice to see in depth reviews on these hotels. At the end of the day though isn’t Oyster making cash by taking cut from hotel sales…..does this mean the person writing the review is going to be 100% honest and open about it?
I launched Tripulu (www.tripulu.com) less than a month ago to tackle these core issues (who’s actually writing the user reviews, don’t take a cut from the sales etc..) and it was all self-financed. $6.4 million is a lot of dough man, I’m not blown away but do respect and love seeing new travel ventures
Jazz Poulin
Founder & CEO
Tripulu
looks cool .
Useless website. Who would trust reviews not from consumers? Pictures look like they were provided by the hotels. Low tech, easy to replicate by anyone.
I feel sorry for those guys. The travel industry is pretty crowded and their website is very basic. I don’t think the investors will see their money back any time soon. Those millions probably all went into paying journalists some nice nights at some nice hotels. Nothing new here, just another travel website going nowhere. What a waste…
Why did they need 6 millions for this? If i wanted nice pics about hotels, I could get a travel magazine from costco, etc. Seems this would be quite easy to duplicate. Not very exciting.
I guess those people found foolish investors willing to sponsor a cool lifestyle until they run out of money? Looks no different from any travel ad / magazine. To look unbiased, you must show customer feedback. Anyway, they’ll never beat hotel.com and others in terms of how easy to find. Any bozo can take nice pictures and put them online.
Nice. But they’ll be competing with some heavyweights.
It’ll be good to crowdsource writers and pay generous amounts for their reviews – say even $50-100 to control quality
Oyster used to be an ad agency in London, before it was bought by LBi Group in 07, if memory serves me right.
Looks like someone grabbed a neat little domain and turned it into a neat idea.
Will someone at Techcrunch please ip check Bobby, Marcelo, Gimi, and Loo? I’ll bet this is all the same lame person. All posted within 12 minutes of each other. If true, I say name and shame.
Lame asses!
6.4 M on what? Unless oyster books hotels by itself it will in deadpool soon. And what about apartment rental reviews?
For the hotels i checked out each had 200+ 300+ 400+ 500+ pictures of the hotel grounds. How can you say they got the pictures from the hotel when expedia and hotels.com get their pictures from the hotels and they only get 10 pictures for the entire hotel. They got 50 just for the pool.
Apartment Bed and Breakfast chalet near Innsbruck in Tyrol Austria
http://vakantie....startkabel.nl/
http://oetztal.startkabel.nl/
I fail to understand what is the value added by offering hundreds of pictures of a swimming pool (perhaps they should sell their photos to hotels?).
Actual user comments / ratings would be more useful. A review by a single journalist isn’t very representative. That’s where Amazon, Expedia, and TravelAdvisor shine.
If Oyster added that, they could become a leader in their industry. I have to say the name is cool.
From the oyster FAQ. Seems to be a bit of an contradiction:
“We act as undercover guests and are not given any sort of special treatment. ”
And a few lines further down:
“All Oyster.com reporters are full-time employees who’ve proven they have sharp eyes, extensive travel experience, critical minds, and excellent writing skills. All of our reporters travel to the hotels we cover and base their coverage on firsthand experience. We are so proud of the team we’ve assembled that we made a page just for them. ”
Including a link to http://www.oyst...bout/reporters/ with names, pictures and bios of all the “undercover agentes”.
Tip for hotel operators in Aruba etc: Print that site and pin it at the check-in desk
How do they manage to take so many of photos of different rooms (beyond the one they are staying in) without anyone being suspicious? Presumably a member of staff has to show them round and wouldn’t they think it rather strange that they were taking photos of everything from the minibar to the toilet.
I don’t understand why anybody would want to see pictures of the showerhead, or of creams they have in the bathroom.
Since they are “undercover”, they probably stay in only one room. But what about the junor suite vs. the double room with a view vs. the single room without a view? What about the North side vs. the West side of the building?
It seems their approach is difficult to scale. By reporting feedback from dozens (or hundreds) of customers, I would think that other websites are in a better position to provide a more complete (and neutral) view?
Perhaps they’ll add that too, though!
Found the website very easy to understand. Great design work. It can be a leader in the travel industry with more creative work and reviews!!
We passed on this deal. Looks like Bain needs a write-off. Shame they can’t enjoy spending $6mm in T&E themselves.
^^^^^^ some one seems a little upset about a missed opportunity
Give me 6 millions!!!! I too will spend it at different hotels in Aruba, taking thousands of pictures of course.
I found several grammatical errors in this review, such as: “the site will also generated” and “travel industry has a whole is”.
These errors create doubt in my mind as to whether the writer is educated in journalism.
Please proofread. Thank you.
Hello
Thank you for this website! Here is mine http://motrin.wikidot.com/
This is nice and very easy method…
I like it….
Looks like they got rid of Andy Laucius already. He is gone from the management page. Just as they shipped.
Pretty sweet looking hotel and a nice pool. Plus, the casino for some nighttime fun
-Jack
Are you a professional journalist? You write very well.