Travel Trends: Professional Content Unsustainable? Oyster Reviews its Own Future After Layoffs
In June 2009, New York based Oyster Hotel Reviews launch was announced, backed with $6.4 million in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures. Oyster’s plan: to provide professional hotel reviews for consumers, written by mainstream travel journalists after in-person visits to the property.

Oyster Hotel Reviews
They promptly hired 20 reporters and at least three editors, who were sent out to stay in and review hotels with all-expenses paid trips.
In September, Bain agreed to an extended $4 million Series A round, bringing the total to $10.4 million.
But $10 million doesn’t get you what it used to. As the year draws to a close, Oyster has dramatically changed its trajectory, with 17 staffers being laid off, including over half the reporters. Elie Seidman, Oyster CEO and co-founder, says the layoffs are part of a plan to focus on “winning in the markets we’ve already covered” and slow down the rate of new market coverage.
Fact remains that slow growth wasn’t part of the announced plans in September. This chapter in the Oyster story is one we have seen before: failure of travel editorial based exclusively on a direct-to-consumer model. Examples of prior failed editorial efforts: Gorp (now owned by Orbitz) and most recently in the rise and fall of Professional Travel Guide (formerly – owned by travel content giant Northstar Travel Media). The issue isn’t whether a travel editorial site can create a compelling experience. They can. It’s that a direct-to-consumer (only) business model can’t support the editorial costs.
And perhaps direct-to-consumer (only) can’t even support the operating costs of a site when they get the content free. Despite getting “free” content from Northstar. Professional Travel Guide was unsuccessful.
Let’s clearly separate editorial-for-consumers-only businesses from other successful travel editorial businesses that are doing well. NorthStar’s core business model is solid. They, and others like Frommers and Fodors have built lasting brands and profitable business models based on licensing and book sales. Others like 10Best and wcities are profitable solely licensing their content. Supplier licensing drives the business model of other editorial companies like VFM Leonardo and Tripfilms.
As Oyster starts its search for additional funding and embarks on the path to profitability, it will rekindle the debate over user generated content vs. professional/editorial content (see Dennis Schaal, Troy Thompson, Pauline Frommer, Robert Flynn).
Oyster Hotel Reviews was differentiating itself from TripAdvisor as a source of authentic hotel reviews.
Oyster vs Tripadvisor
Professional Travel Guide’s failure and Oyster’s slowdown will likely tilt the favor in favor of the UGC proponents {disclosure: as a semantic search engine that searches over 5,000 sites including editorial sites like Frommers and Fodors as well as consumer UGC sites like Yahoo! Travel, TripAdvisor, we are agnostic in this debate – other then knowing different consumers want both types of content at different times but generally most want the ‘gestalt’ necessary to make a confident decision}.
The blogosphere hasn’t been kind to Oyster, but Oyster’s reviews are of very high quality and we hope Oyster is able to raise additional funding and create a viable business.
What do you think? Can standalone consumer-only travel editorial sites create a viable business? Or does new travel largely come from consumers in the future?
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