Imagine booking a Las Vegas hotel because you specifically wanted to avoid the poorly reviewed OYO Hotel & Casino, only to arrive in town and discover the hotel you booked doesn’t actually exist. And not only that — OYO scammed you into booking with them!
That’s what happened to traveler Ariana Patiño after she booked a room at a hotel called “Palette Las Vegas.” The online listing showed modern-looking rooms, a pool surrounded by palm trees and what appeared to be a legitimate hotel just off the Las Vegas Strip.
There was only one problem: when she arrived at the address, there was no Palette Las Vegas.
There was OYO.
And apparently, that was the plan.
Palette Las Vegas has been listed at 117 East Tropicana Avenue, the same address as OYO Hotel & Casino Las Vegas, the former Hooters Casino Hotel and, before that, the San Remo. As of August 13, Palette listings could be found on major travel sites including Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Trip.com. OYO’s own website was also actively selling rooms under the Palette Las Vegas name.
She Booked Palette Because She Didn’t Want to Stay at OYO
The story blew up after Patiño posted about what happened on TikTok.
According to her account, she had already looked at OYO and didn’t like what she saw in the reviews, particularly complaints about cleanliness and maintenance. So when she found Palette Las Vegas, she thought she had found another inexpensive option in roughly the same area.
She booked Palette, received a confirmation and headed to the address when she arrived in Las Vegas.
Instead of Palette, she found OYO.
Patiño said she drove around trying to figure out where the hotel entrance was before finally calling. She was then told to go inside OYO to check in. According to her account, when she questioned hotel staff about the missing Palette hotel, she was told Palette didn’t actually exist and that the listing had been put up to see which advertisement would get more traction.
That’s one hell of a way to conduct a marketing test.
It also defeats one of the main reasons people read hotel reviews in the first place. If you research Hotel A, decide the reviews are terrible and deliberately book Hotel B instead, you probably don’t expect Hotel B to secretly be Hotel A with a different name and different pictures.
The Pictures Don’t Exactly Match Reality Either
This isn’t simply a case of OYO experimenting with a future hotel name.
The Palette listings used altered images that appeared to present the existing property as something different. Side-by-side comparisons published after the story broke show the same basic OYO building and pool areas, except with branding changed or removed and portions of the property visually cleaned up or altered. Vital Vegas reports that AI was used to manipulate the images.
That’s where this goes from a strange branding exercise into something travelers should probably be paying attention to.
OYO isn’t exactly hiding the corporate connection now, either. The company’s own reservation website has a live page titled “Palette Las Vegas” at 117 East Tropicana Avenue. The listing promises “contemporary comfort,” “thoughtfully designed rooms,” Strip views, outdoor pools and an “elevated experience.” Oddly enough, the description itself switches the address to 115 E. Tropicana in several places even though the listing header says 117 E. Tropicana.
Meanwhile, OYO Hotel & Casino is still the hotel sitting there.
OYO Has a Review Problem
There is an obvious reason a second name might be attractive.
OYO Las Vegas has been getting hammered in online reviews for years. TripAdvisor currently ranks it number 240 out of 260 Las Vegas hotels. Expedia currently shows the property at roughly 6 out of 10, with recent guests continuing to complain about an aging property, cleanliness issues, high fees and elevator problems.
Here’s where things get even stranger: $57 is also suspiciously close to the current resort fee being disclosed on OYO’s own Palette page. The page currently lists a resort fee of $56.63 per room, per night, plus separate parking charges of $19 to $21 per night depending on the day.
Whatever fee Patiño was actually charged for, the bigger problem is that she believed she was booking one hotel and arrived at another.
Palette Is a Real Brand. This Particular Hotel Isn’t.
There is some corporate reality behind the Palette name, which makes this more complicated than somebody simply inventing a fake hotel out of thin air.
Palette is a hotel brand controlled by the same corporate family as OYO. OYO’s parent company, formerly known as Oravel Stays and now operating as Prism, controls several hospitality brands including OYO, Motel 6, Townhouse, Sunday and Palette. The site also found another version of the same Las Vegas property being marketed under the name “Collection O.”
Apparently, there have also been internal discussions about eventually renaming OYO Las Vegas as “Sunday.”
Fine. Hotels rebrand all the time in Las Vegas. The Monte Carlo became Park MGM. Bally’s became Horseshoe. The Mirage is being turned into Hard Rock.
But normally the hotel actually changes its name.
You don’t usually find out about the rebrand after landing at the airport, pulling up to the address and being told the hotel on your reservation doesn’t exist.
And when a real rebrand happens, the building doesn’t magically receive a clean slate because somebody uploaded different pictures to Booking.com.
How Did This Get Onto Major Travel Websites?
That may be the most troubling part of this mess.
These listings weren’t buried on some sketchy website thrown together last week. They appeared on major travel booking platforms that millions of people use specifically because travelers assume there is some level of verification behind the properties being sold.
Palette and Collection O listings were on all the major booking sites including Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Trip.com. Booking.com was still displaying a Palette Las Vegas listing at 117 East Tropicana when we checked on August 13.
So what exactly are these booking sites verifying?
The address was already occupied by another hotel. The photos had been altered. The name on the reservation wasn’t the name on the building. Yet someone could apparently book it, pay for it and not discover any of this until arriving in Las Vegas.
People online have compared it to the ghost-kitchen game on food-delivery apps, where one restaurant operates under five or ten different names so each “brand” gets its own menu, marketing and reviews.
Except ordering wings from a restaurant with a fake name is one thing.
Flying across the country and discovering your hotel has a fake name is another.
Could This Be Considered Deceptive Advertising?
Nobody has publicly established that a crime occurred, and proving fraud involves more than simply showing that customers were confused.
Nevada law, however, is pretty clear that businesses can’t knowingly make false representations concerning the source, affiliation, characteristics, quality or other aspects of goods and services. Nevada’s deceptive trade practices laws cover false representations and misleading advertising in several forms.
Whether state regulators decide the Palette listings cross that line remains to be seen.
Is this a problem for the property: this isn’t only a hotel. OYO operates a casino, which means the company exists in one of the most heavily regulated businesses in Nevada. The Nevada Gaming Control Board tends to take questions surrounding the conduct and suitability of gaming licensees a little more seriously than your average Yelp dispute.
For a Las Vegas tourism industry already fighting complaints about resort fees, parking fees, inflated prices and declining value, a visitor saying she booked a hotel that literally wasn’t there isn’t exactly the kind of publicity the city needs.
Don’t Trust the Hotel Name Alone When Booking Vegas
For travelers, there is a simple lesson here: before booking an unfamiliar Las Vegas hotel, search the address, not just the hotel name.
Put the street address into Google Maps. Look at Street View. Search the address along with the word “hotel” and see what has historically operated there. Then look at reviews on several different sites instead of trusting the rating attached to one listing.
If a hotel in Las Vegas suddenly has a brand-new name, almost no review history and a gallery full of suspiciously perfect pictures, there’s nothing wrong with spending another five minutes figuring out what you’re actually booking.
Calling the hotel directly to verify a third-party reservation isn’t a bad idea either.
As of August 13, OYO Hotel & Casino Las Vegas is still sitting at 117 East Tropicana Avenue.
Apparently, depending on which website you happen to be looking at, it just has a few extra identities now.
