Do you like oysters? Oysters on the half shell? Oysters raw, steamed, fried, or grilled? Do you like your slimy bivalves dripping with cocktail sauce, or do you prefer them fresh out of the shell. Do you like oysters Rockefeller? Do you like oysters on a bun? Do you like McOysters? Do you like oyster pie? Do you like oyster mushrooms? Do you like the pearls that come from Moldovan oysters? If you like oysters of any kind I’m sorry, you’ll have to wait for another issue of InfoAve Premium, the only oysters here are in EB’s garbage can (leftover from a huge party last night – a party to which I was not invited, by-the-way).
The oyster I’m talking about here is an oyster with a dot com after it. And it has nothing with any other kind of oyster. So if it’s oysters you want, go to Red Lobster or your favorite seafood shack. Don’t come to EB or me. We don’t have some (as they say down south). EB did but her guests consumed them all.
Oyster.com is a site that employs a lot of photographers who sneak around hotels taking real pictures of the real hotel and the real rooms, so you get a feel for what the hotel really is like rather than what the hotel’s marketing company wants you to think it’s like. The oyster folks show you photographs – the hotel’s advertising photo and the real oyster photo. And then they give you the lowdown on the hotel, noting (sometimes humorously) the discrepancy between the two photos.
To wit – Oyster.com’s hilarious staff of writers (who have learned well from me, I might add) describe the differences between the brochure photo of a hotel in Honolulu, and the Oyster photographer’s photo (no the photographer is not an oyster – he/she is a human bean):
“Oh no! The quiet beach paradise this couple seems to be enjoying in the above marketing photo of the JW Marriott Ihilani Resort on Oahu does not seem to be quite so serene these days. The flawless expanse of blue sky shown in the promo pics seems to be… not such a flawless expanse anymore.
Oh, no, no. In fact, the beach scene you see on the right — complete with cranes and unsightly green construction fencing — is what you’d experience if you and your loved one took a hot stroll on the sand in your breezy vacation attire today. The cranes and mess just beyond the sand happen to be the earliest stages of the massive coming-in-2011 Disney Vacation Club Resort Hawaii — and when all 21 acres of that beast are completely built up, there’s not gonna be a whole lot of serenity to be had on that beach at all.
Regardless of the construction, the throngs of splashing and screaming children don’t make for a very romantic scene right now anyway. Oh, reality…”
See? If you’re planning a trip, or just want to see how marketing works and how quickly truth dirties it up, you’ll want to visit our site of the week…found by my oyster-eating partner EB by the whale –
Oyster.com no oysters at all, not on the site, nor at EB’s nor anywhere in this newsletter. Just go to our site of the week, oysterphobes, there are no bivalves there at all. But there is a whole lot of interesting info about hotels, and a lot of really funny – but true – reviews.