Online hotel review service Oyster features a Photo Fakeout category in their blog that gives a reality check to hotel reviews, pitting a hotel’s promotional images with actual photographs.

The only disappointing thing about Oyster’s Photo Fakeouts is that there aren’t more of them—and that this isn’t the dedicated feature of any site we can find. Popular travel planning and review site TripAdvisor allows for user-submitted photo uploads, which are nice, and I’ve sometimes had good luck searching Flickr for the name of hotels, but it’d be great to see something like these Photo Fakeouts in an easily searchable database.

As weblog Of Zen and Computer points out, it’s worth noting that pictures can be manipulated to look bad in much the same way as they can to look good. That said, sometimes the difference is clear and egregious, and it’s nice to get a reality check before you book.

If you’ve got your own methods for searching out the reality of your hotel before you book, let’s hear your tips in the comments.

[ Visit Photo Fakeout ]

A hotel building leans before falling in a heavily flooded river after Typhoon Morakot hit Taitung county, Taiwan, Sunday, Aug. 9, 2009. The six-story hotel collapsed and plunged into the river Sunday morning after floodwaters eroded its base – all 300 people in the hotel had been evacuated and uninjured.

Scientists in Germany have developed the “Hotel Room of the Future” to show hotels how they can use the latest technology to make guests feel more comfortable.
Steve Rosenberg went along to the laboratory at the Fraunhofer Institute in Duisburg to test the room’s hi-tech features.

It’s not everyday that you see a wild elephant standing next to you at the reception of a hotel.

But in the Mfuwe Lodge in the South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, the sight of one or even ten elephants strolling around the lobby is a regular occurrence.

Unwittingly built on the elephant’s traditional path in 1998, the Mfuwe Lodge stands directly en-route to this elephant herd’s favourite food – wild mangoes.

Andy Hogg, 44, Director at the Bushcamp Company that runs the Mfuwe Lodge, has lived in the South Luangwa national park since 1982.

But in his 26 years of dealing with wild animals in the Zambian national park, Andy has never seen such intimate interaction between man and beast.

“This is the only place in the world where elephants freely get so close to humans,” says the 44-year-old.

“The elephants start coming through base camp in late November of each year to eat the mangoes from our trees.

“When they are ripe they come through and they stand about for four to six weeks coming back each day or second day to eat the mangoes.”

Living in the 9, 500 square kilometre national park, the ten strong elephant herd are led to the lodge each day by the matriarchal of the herd, Wonky Tusk.

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