Interview with Elie Seidman, CEO of Oyster.com

Started in June of 2009 by Elie Seidman and two others, Oyster.com is a hotel review website that allows you to view unbiased reviews of hotels and resorts, and evens shows pictures of advertisements versus the actual property so you don’t end up wasting your money and feeling disappointed.  After checking out the reviews, you can also book your next vacation right on the site.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Elie Seidman.

Where did the name “Oyster” come from?

We were looking for a name that connoted the excitement, mystery and romance of travel and great hotels in particular.Like the search for a great hotel that Oyster makes far easier, not every Oyster has a Pearl. We therefore made our rating system the Pearl – the better the hotel, the more Pearls we give it.

Where did the idea for Oyster come from?  What’s the main purpose of the site?

It came from a need that me and my two co-founders felt. All three of us love to travel and love hotels, but we all have very different needs. We all found that the existing solutions for hotel search and discovery, the OTAs and TripAdvisor, fail in important ways. On TripAdvisor, you are reading the words of relatively anonymous travellers. They might or might not be anything like you and the reviews end up reading – very often – like “I loved it, I hated it, I loved it, I hated it”. The reviews polarize and the net experience – for us at least – was that its just too much work to go through all of those reviews and even having gone through the all the reviews, you still don’t know what you are going to get when you arrive. The OTAs on the other hand tend to publish the marketing literature and photographs of the hotels themselves so using them is a bit like reading the hotels own brochures.

Does your hotel really look like this?

Neither TripAdvisor or the OTAs curate the hotels – they don’t tell you “this hotel is great if you are traveling with kids and this hotel is great if you want a romantic getaway with your wife”. In addition to our detailed coverage of the hotels – based on having been there – we do a lot of curation and create extensive content like our awards and best lists that our customers can read to both get inspired and figure out the perfect hotel.

The bottom line – we wanted something easier, more interesting and less laborious to use, and far more visual. That’s Oyster. We sent our reviewers to the hotels and we covered them from A to Z and took an abundance of pictures. What you see on Oyster is what you’ll see when you arrive.

A big part of the site is to show what hotels really look like, how do you go about doing that?

Our reviewers travel anonymously to the hotels and while they are there, they photograph the room they are staying in as well as many other parts of the hotels they can get access to. You can’t review a restaurant without eating the food and you can’t review a hotel without being there in person to see with your own eyes (and your own camera). We use high quality photography equipment (Nikon DSLRs) and great hotels look great on Oyster and bad hotels look bad. But a hotel can’t hide. We don’t crop out the bad parts or edit out the details that the hotel neglected.

As a reviewer, we need to think of all the various types of people who might use the hotel and address their needs. The list goes on and on and you can see the result in our curated awards and best of lists, our verified amenities list and in the body of the reviews.

Is there any advice you can offer people who are booking a hotel, maybe hints that it won’t look exactly as pictured?

Well, we created Oyster specifically to solve that problem and we believe we are solving it as well or better than anyone. So the best bet to find the perfect hotel is to use Oyster.

Thanks, Elie, I will definitely check out Oyster before I book my next hotel!

Photo Credit: williamcho on Flickr