Website Exposes Fake Hotel Photos

By Alex in Blogs & Internet on Sep 11, 2009 at 2:55 am

Have you ever gone to your hotel room and thought "hey, this rinky dink room wasn’t at all like the photo on the website!" (I’m looking at you, Boston Omni Parker House Hotel). Well, a website named Oyster has stepped up to the task of taking actual honest-to-goodness (not photoshopped for brochures) photos of hotels. Surprisingly, a lot of the hotel rooms – especially the expensive ones I never stay at – are really nice looking, so it’s kind of a fun way to gawk at hotels you’d never stay at …

So far Oyster only has a limited number of hotels in just a few cities* but photos of the one I’ve stayed at, the Embassy Suites Hotel on Paradise Road in Las Vegas looked exactly like what I remembered. They should step it up a notch and maybe accept user submitted photos (this being Web 2.0 and all).

Link – Thanks Leah!

*Too bad they didn’t have photos of the rinky dink room I stayed in at the BOPH – it was literally the size of a closet! And actually the experience is quite useful: whenever I read reviews of a hotel at TripAdvisor, Expedia or similar websites, I always look up the Omni Parker – that way, I can gauge how much of the review is plain BS.

Tags: hotel, Osyter, photoshopped, review

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Skipweasel
Sep 11th, 2009 at 2:59 am
Hotels in general are vile. I’ve worked round the back of too many to ever want to go through the front and pay.
Alex
Sep 11th, 2009 at 3:45 am
Unfortunately when you travel, they’re kind of a necessity. Hotels are better than sleeping under a bridge, that’s for sure …
GQ
Sep 11th, 2009 at 6:07 am
“it was literally the size of a closet!”

No, it wasn’t.
Skipweasel
Sep 11th, 2009 at 6:16 am
Alex – we usually camp or stay with friends. These days we can probably find friends within 50 miles of almost anywhere we care to stay in the UK and, come to think of it, quite large bits of Europe, too.
felixthecat
Sep 11th, 2009 at 7:27 am
In Russia, the hotel I stayed at was spartan in some ways, but immaculate. American hotels always feel slightly scuzzy to me. The Mayflower in Wash DC is pretty excellent though.
Frank de Paola
Sep 11th, 2009 at 7:35 am
” Have you ever went…” ? Those of us who write English tend to say ” Have you ever gone…?
Now I go.
Yesterday I went.
Sometimes I have gone.
Kevin
Sep 11th, 2009 at 7:50 am
BOPH is an extremely old hotel. Virtually every room is different. I think Alex got a short straw.
Kay
Sep 11th, 2009 at 8:45 am
I had a pretty small room in the BOPH, but it’s not like I was throwing a party for 100 of my closest friends in it, so who cared?

My complaint about the BOPH was that it’s not sufficiently sound-proofed. But this is true for many downtown hotels — at five a.m. you’re awakened to the lovely sound of garbage trucks.
Fran
Sep 11th, 2009 at 9:16 am
I travel extensively and have stayed in MANY hotels. I too have stayed at the BOPH and found the room to be not much bigger than my walk in closet. My jaw dropped when I walked into that room and saw how incredibly tiny it was. I just checked the website and they have rooms called “Petite Singles” with a bed and for only one person. Had to be what I got.
Ant Dude
Sep 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Don’t always believe what you see from marketing.
Christophe
Sep 11th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I just had a presentation of the Spanish company InteriorVista : they are designing fake interior pictures, for example fake kitchen pictures for Ikea. They looked AMAZINGLY real.
So why not a fake spotless bedroom? I think you’ll be surprized at tomorrow’s pictures.
Alex
Sep 11th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
@Frank de Paola – you’re absolutely right! And I knew that, but obviously made a grammatical error. Fixed now.

My BOPH story is actually a little bit more than just about a small room. Now, the room WAS very small. How small? How about you can’t close the bathroom door if the front door was open. Or that you could almost touch both of the walls with your arms stretched out?

It was very late when we checked in and when we saw the size of the room, my wife and I talked to the front desk. We got the room changed by a really nice lady, but about half an hour later, the night manager nixed the change saying that there was no more room left at the hotel. Everything was sold out, he rudely said and then refused to talk to us. We tried to argue (we had booked it through hotels.com – which was a cheaper price. Hotels.com refused to back us up on it – incidentally that was the last time I used the website). By then it was 2:30AM and we got too tired and slept. At 6AM, the lovely sound of jackhammers woke us up.

I talked to the day manager, and got us changed to a different room (sold out? What sold out? There were plenty of rooms). I ended up extending my stay at the BOPH because my trip lasted longer than expected.

Now, this was several years ago, but I still remember the experience and won’t stay there ever again.
wgc749
Sep 11th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Just to add to the marketing aspect,there are companies that specialize in providing all those beautiful stock photos of people,places,and things that you see when you visit a website.By the way Alex,I don’t know how credible the story was,but I read on howstuffworks.com last week that those few great minds recently met (in California,I think),and have declared that we have now moved into the period of Web 3.0.Thanks for the post though.This information will be useful for a long time to come.

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