Professional hotel-review site Oyster.com has abandoned its more than year-old practice of serving as a hotel booking engine.
Since mid-2010 Oyster had been enabling consumers to book hotels on the site through a third-party inventory partner, but has abandoned the practice and will "experiment with various monetization practices," says co-founder and CEO Elie Seidman.
"We decided we did not want to be in the business of direct booking hotel rooms because there are already many many options for customers who need a credit card system with which to swipe their card on a hotel booking," Seidman says, pointing to "myriad online travel agencies" and hotel websites as among consumer alternatives.
Hotels' insistence on parity pricing didn't help matters much, Seidman says.
"We find that function [hotel booking] to be basically a commodity and not a place where Oyster could build a sustainable differentiated advantage," Seidman says.
Seidman says Oyster will instead put its differentiation efforts into things such as "being the expert hotel reviewer," which the company can excel at.
This is a major turnabout for Oyster, which in mid-2010 argued that it could enhance its differentiation by serving as a venue for both journalist-written hotel reviews and taking consumers' hotel bookings.
Oyster also confronts the perennial problem of how to sustain putting an adequate number of journalists out in the field to handle reviewing hotels and keeping them up to date.
Founded in 2008 and with $18.5 million in funding from the Travel Channel and Bain Capital, Oyster finds itself still experimenting with ways to make some dough.
That, of course, is not an unheard of problem.
With direct-booking on the site gone, consumers using the site can now read the reviews, which outline the pros and cons of staying at a particular hotel, and book rooms on third-party sites in several ways.
Among them, consumers can book on an Expedia ad, for example, and book at the OTA as a singular booking choice.
Or for some hotels, consumers can select "show prices" and see booking windows open for sites such as Booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz and/or Priceline.
Seidman says Oyster is on pace to cover 125 destinations with its reviews by the second quarter of 2012 and will release an iPad app in several weeks.