Oyster leaves hotel ratings to the pros

— -- A new travel website is taking a contrarian approach to an increasingly complicated — and controversial — question: How do I choose where to stay on vacation?

Launched this week with reviews of 250 hotels and resorts in the Caribbean and Miami, Oyster Hotel Reviews aims to uncover lodging pearls through extensive reports and photos produced by 10 full-time journalists. Oyster says they book and stay anonymously at each property. Founder Elie Seidman told Business Week it would take about $40 million for Oyster to break even.

That's a contrast to the "wisdom of the crowds" method employed by TripAdvisor.com, whose millions of hotel user reviews are coming under renewed fire from critics who say they can be misleading, manipulated or fraudulent. (The company will not give specific numbers for reviews vs. other travel posts on the site.)

Unlike anonymous user critiques or some guidebooks that take freebies, "we're offering a professional, structured perspective," Seidman says.

He says the site's in-house reporters post at least 125 of their own photos per review, using a 65-page manual to praise and criticize lodgings in Aruba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Miami.

The site plans to add 200 hotels in New York and Las Vegas by mid-July, and will add reader comments to reporter write-ups.

How does Oyster — which hopes to cover 20,000 hotels in about 175 destinations by 2012 — choose lodgings to evaluate? "It's art as well as science," Seidman says. Targeted to vacationers in popular destinations, they will appeal to a range of budgets and demographics. But "we're not a luxury-focus site," he says, "and you're not going to see a $35-a-night place near the airport or a small bed-and-breakfast inn."

Oyster's debut comes amid continuing popularity and increasing controversy surrounding user-generated reviews — particularly those at Expedia-owned TripAdvisor, which is a USA TODAY partner in reader surveys and claims more than 11 million members and 25 million monthly visitors. In a 2008 JupiterResearch survey, four out of 10 researching trips online used some user-generated content for their most recent trip.