Oyster Photo Fakeouts: Comparing Hotel Reality And Marketing
Before I book a hotel or flight, I do extensive research on the Internet to find out more about the company, building or location. Sites like Tripadvisor or Seatguru are a great help, as they combine marketing information with third party information from people who actually used the service in the past.
Those information have to be taken with a grain of salt, as some marketers have begun to exploit those portals by adding fake positive comments about a service or hotel.
There is another area that is often used by marketers to make a hotel or location look better than it actually is. Oyster Photo Fakeouts is a photo series that puts marketing photos next to real photos. The photos are taken by members of the site and shown right next to the marketing photos.
It is interesting to see that similar techniques are used on many different hotels and locations in the world. While most of the photos are not faked, they are shot from angles that make the objects on the photo look better than they really are in reality.
But Oyster is not only about the comparison of marketing photos and reality, it can also be used to look at real hotel, beach and location photos. It is therefor great for getting a second opinion photo wise after selecting a few hotels that you might want to book. See it as a second visual opinion and a way to compare the marketing photos that you have seen on a hotel or traveling agency website, You might be surprised about the differences.
The website is concentrating on two types of locations: US cities and beach locations. Cities include New York City, Washington D.C., Miami, Las Vegas or San Francisco. The beach locations are mostly Caribbean like Bahamas or Jamaica.
There is a lot to explore under Recommendations and Inspiration, for instance romantic, value or spa hotels under recommendations, or the best all inclusive beaches under Inspiration.
Oyster offers a great service that could make the difference between a wonderful holiday or business trip, and a nightmarish one. I highly suggest to use the service in conjunction with other services like Trip Advisor for the best overall picture.
Advertisement
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.