A new hotel review site, Oyster Hotel Reviews has launched, claiming to offer authoritative reviews from travel writers.

The company says its aim is to bring "clarity and authority to the difficult task of choosing the right hotel to stay at while traveling".

The idea is not new. Oyster ( www.oyster.com ) is trying to do what companies such as Frommers are doing – offering hotel reviews written by "experts" and it signals a swinging of the pendulum back from the glut of unfiltered content of sites such as Trip Advisor.

The company which has been in stealth mode since its founding in March 2008 says it has spent the past 15 months dispatching a staff of experienced journalists with credentials ranging from New York Times to Men's Journal, The Village Voice and Conde Nast Traveler among others, to anonymously stay in hotels, investigate them methodically and in depth, and take hundreds of photos so that readers can see the hotel before they go.

To assure that consumers get apples-to-apples comparisons, Oyster Hotel Reviews reporters evaluate hotels on 70 different quantitative and qualitative dimensions.

A check on the website shows currently limited offerings – it covers hotels of New York, Miami, Aruba, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic.

It says that many more locations will be added to the site in the months ahead, including Las Vegas in July 2009.

"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."

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.

To compete in this crowded space, it is clear that Oyster will have to expand its coverage of hotels considerably and quickly if it is to be taken seriously.

4Hoteliers is the "Official Daily News" of WIT09

www.webintravel.com - October 20-23, 2009 Suntec Convention Centre, Singapore

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