Startup Stories Series: Oyster's Path From Near-Collapse to TripAdvisor Acquisition
Skift Take
For a travel startup like Oyster, there's nothing like attracting the interest of a deep-pocketed buyer with a huge consumer audience. Oyster knew that is what it needed and it bucked the odds and lived to fight another day.
Editor's Note: This is the inaugural piece in our Skift Startup Stories series. In it we'll document travel startup problems, solutions, and lessons from a variety of angles, hoping to shed light on what separates the winners from the losers.
You can read all of the stories in the series here.
Prospects looked bleak in June 2013 for Oyster.com, a website that featured realistic and professionally taken hotel photos and expert reviews, when it fired most of its staff and put itself up for sale.
It appeared as though Oyster's journey would turn out to be a sadly familiar story in the annals of travel startups, another unhappy ending.
Even then Oyster's saga was somewhat distinct, though. Many travel startups that fail are essentially copycat sites, producing a slightly different riff on a very familiar song.
Oyster, which bills itself as "The Hotel Tell-All," indeed was doing something differently than just about everyone else.
Founded in 2008 by Elie Seidman and Ariel Charytan, Oyster showcased its hotel photo fakeouts, contrasting unblemished and glitzy marketing photos from hotels on sites such as Orbitz with its own realistic shots of the tiny or overcrowded swimming pool or cramped guest room. Its journalist-written hotel reviews not only told prospective guests what was attractive about a property but also outlined the cons.
But Oyster's problem was that it just didn't have the audience and resources for a sustainable business given the expense of sending staff or freelancers into the field to perform on-site hotel reviews and to update them periodically.
Like innumerable startups, Oyster labored away in trying to come up with a business model that could monetize its bevy of content.
As news broke two years ago that Oyster was trying to find a buyer, Oyster management told employees it notched modest revenue of nearly $500,000 in the first quarter of 2013. But in the Fall of 2013 the hotel research and shopping site carried out a couple o
