Hotel Reviews from the Sensual Oyster

Finding an honest review of hotel can sometimes be tough. The best recommendations tend to be from people you know and trust, but those people don't usually have the skinny on every hotel around the country or the world. So far, TripAdvisor tends to showcase the most unbiased reviews, but those reviews vacillate in quality and focus, and to read the reviews for some hotels is like reading a schizophrenics diary -- the hotel is amazing, no the hotel is horrible, no the hotel was just OK. And as we mentioned before, the reviews aren't vetted for legitimacy, so it's a bit of a crapshoot. Enter Oyster Hotel Reviews, an upgraded version of TripAdvisor.

Launched on Monday, this site sends out a crack team of undercover reporters to review hotels—no comps, no discounts, and no special treatment. The on-the-ground journalists give their honest opinions of the service, the rooms, the wifi, and then top it all off with dozens of un-airbrushed photos. The site launched with 450 hotel reviews in Aruba, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Miami, with New York and Las Vegas coming soon, and then Scottsdale/Phoenix, Honolulu, Maui, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to be completed either before the end of the year or by early Q1 2010. As of now, they don’t offer booking directly on the site, but they direct readers to Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia, as well as Hotels.com. In terms of the name: yes, it’s about finding a “pearl” of a hotel. CEO Elie Seidman said, “The sensual oyster holds in it the potential to discover a beautiful pearl. But not every oyster has a pearl. Finding the right hotel can be a struggle, but at Oyster Hotel Reviews our hotel reviews give you the ‘raw’ truth—independent reporting and honest, undoctored hotel photography—to make it easy to find what you’re really looking for.” Behold the sensual oyster! If you’ve ever thought about reviewing hotels for a living, they’re hiring.