Thursday, August 8, 2013

Use Oyster to help find your next road trip hotel

Has this ever happened to you? After planning your vacation you finally reach your destination to find a dirty room, miscellaneous fees, or pictures that look nothing like those shown on their website. Since you feel that your trip has been ruined and you wonder what you could have done differently? Whether you are searching hotels for a vacation, honeymoon or business there is a website that may help called Oyster. I realize there are hundreds of sites that offer reviews of hotels including Trip Advisor, Yelp, Frommer’s, Fodors, and Hotels.com to name a few. I’m not saying these should be forgotten but Oyster goes above and beyond to help you reduce the chances of a nightmare.







By using their own investigators who visit hotels taking hundreds of pictures and researching everything related to a stay, Oyster takes the guesswork out of the process for you. I did notice that the focus is on the world’s most popular destinations and larger cities. This makes sense because there are more hotels and more interest in these cities unlike my query into my home state of New Hampshire which yielded a laughably low one review. To give you a comparison in New York City alone there were 249 hotels listed. You may not find information on every hotel in the world that you might want to visit but give them time as they are adding new hotels as quickly as they can.

They also try to help if you are looking for a hotel for a specific purpose. One of my favorites is the food section (no surprise here) that includes their recommendations for restaurants that are at hotels. I'm kind of torn on this one because it seems like every time I try to eat food at a hotel it isn't that great but I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule. They have other categories including luxury, value, romantic, beach (my wife would love this one) and kid friendly hotels.

So if you are looking to take one of our road trips or traveling anywhere and you must stay in a hotel try Oyster. It may not guarantee that you won't have any problems (hey, they can't control the weather) but for your research on a place to stay they may be your best option.