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.
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