New York based Oyster Hotel Reviews recently launched to a lot of hype - hype about the reviews on the site being authentic, hype about the promoters being Microsoft alumni, and so on.

Let’s take a peek inside their shell and see what they have lined up. What they do have is funding - $6.4 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Accelerator Ventures, with plans for a Series B round. 

And what they plan to have is to spend that money on traveling and checking out hotels. Their writers will be visiting properties, sleeping in the beds, talking to guests and only visited properties will have reviews on the site. Admirable, but severely restricts their ability to expand their footprint. As of now, they cover four destinations - Aruba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Miami. And they have plans to add reviews for hotels in Las Vegas and New York soon.

Speaking as a traveler, I prefer to form my opinion about a hotel based on multiple user reviews, rather than the single opinion of travel writer. For starters, there’s not much point in a reporter going to all the trouble to visit a hotel, take pictures and videos, and then say that the place absolutely sucks and to stay away. No mainstream travel magazine will ever do that.

Which is why most professional hotel reviews are uniformly positive in tone. The bad ones never get published. So if you want to really know whether a place sucks, then you need to visit sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Now if Oyster is going to send it’s people to hotels and then publish the reviews even if the place is a total dump, it might be useful.

Mind you, unless they’re able to scale it to cover every major city and most hotels in every city, it’s pointless. And once they do it, there also arises the question of how long the review is valid for. What happens a couple of years down the line? A hotel which looks good now may be a dump in 2 years’ time. Are they going to re-review it? Don’t think so.

There’s limits to what Oyster is going to be able to do, and unless they can work out some way to sneak in user reviews or another easier and cheaper way to review a lot more hotels, I’m afraid the investors are going to be left holding a lot of very nice reviews and pictures.

For more information, visit www.oyster.com/

Posted on June 27th, 2009 by PLing
Filed under: Hotels