Distribution Strategies
New site to position itself as an unbiased consumer advocate
Oyster Hotel Reviews (www.oyster.com), a new hotel reviews site featuring expert hotel reviews, has been launched.
Published: 23 Jun 2009
Oyster Hotel Reviews (www.oyster.com), a new hotel reviews site featuring expert hotel reviews, has been launched.
Currently, the site is featuring properties in following cities: New York, Miami, Aruba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. More locations will be added to the site in the months ahead, including Las Vegas in July 2009.
In stealth mode since its founding in March 2008, Oyster Hotel Reviews has spent the past 15 months dispatching a staff of journalists.
Oyster Hotel Reviews Hotel Investigators experience every hotel they review. They anonymously stay in hotels, investigate them and take photos so that readers can see the hotel in depth before they go.
In an effort to offer consumers apples-to-apples comparisons, Oyster Hotel Reviews reporters evaluate hotels on 70 different quantitative and qualitative dimensions.
“Reading hotel websites and anonymous reviews, people can’t discover the truth. There are tremendous differences between what our reporters bring back and the marketing distortions of the hotel industry,” said Elie Seidman, founder and CEO of Oyster Hotel Reviews.
“The vast majority of hotel descriptions and photos circulating on the Internet originates in the hotel’s own marketing departments and gets reproduced over and over as legitimate truth - but it's often highly misleading. By pulling back the sheets and revealing what you’re really going to get, Oyster Hotel Reviews will fundamentally change the way people make hotel decisions,” added Seidman.
According to a report filed by MediaPost, Oyster features 50,000 unedited photos and nearly a million words of copy that search engines can index and rank well over time. “That's where our search expertise comes into play,” the spokesperson said. “The on-site search index is Google-fast. Queries load in less than one second.”
Oyster Hotel Reviews management includes Microsoft alumni - Andy Laucius and Eytan Seidman, both formerly on Live Search (now Bing.com) - and two entrepreneurs, Ariel Charytan and Elie Seidman.
Read more: Hotel reviews
Printer-friendly version
Send to friend-
May 23, 2013 - May 24, 2013Novotel West London
-
May 28, 2013 - May 29, 2013Singapore
-
Sep 23, 2013 - Sep 24, 2013The Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel, Chicago
Featured Articles
-
Act now to meet your customer at every stage of the digital journey
Gone are the days when one could talk about how challenging it is to view multi-channel digital data in one place. Today acting on available data and working out dynamic, real-time strategies that push a closer to making a decision must happen in the moment. EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta investigates
-
Focus on social media training for skills and knowledge transfer
As social media has become much more integrated into the business, hotel companies have taken a much more systematic approach to integrating it into their business strategy and corporate culture. For Carlson Rezidor, social may not be a new revenue generator from day one, but training staff in the medium shows foresight.
-
A leaf out of Accor’s book: how to drive direct bookings to €2 billion
French hotel group Accor is aggressively aiming to increase its digital turnover by 45% within the next three years. It is also pushing for two-thirds of sales to come from the direct channel. That seems a big ask so EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta talks to Rémy Merckx, VP e-commerce sales and distribution, Accor about what’s in store