Oyo Caught Deceiving Guests With Shady Travel Site Listings and Fake Photos

By Scott Roeben, on August 13 2026
4 min read 1 comment
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What do you do if your Las Vegas hotel is so unpopular it’s challenging to get people to visit? Easy: List your hotel online under another name, complete with fake-ass photos of your fake-ass hotel.

That’s exactly what Oyo Las Vegas has been doing, and it’s an embarrassing debacle that could be considered outright fraud.

Oyo has been posting Oyo on a variety of legitimate travel sites (as well as its own Web site) as “Palette” and “Collection O.” That’s right, Oyo has been caught catfishing. Shit, meet fan.

We are not making this up.

Yes, OYO is supposed to be capitalized because it’s an initialism for “On Your Own.” We hate that crap, so you’re getting Oyo in this story.

This story first came to our attention via Jennifer Gay, who runs the wildly popular Vegas Starfish accounts on various social platforms.

She first heard about the scam from the TikTok account of Ariana Patino.

Patino was suckered into booking at Oyo after she found online listings for Palette Las Vegas, a completely fictional hotel.

The listings not only rename Oyo, but the hotel’s operator altered images of Oyo with A.I. to make it appear Palette and Collection O are real places. The absolutely ginormous balls on these grifters.

Oyo has created a bizarro alternate reality where people are actually staying at Oyo.

To be clear, we aren’t talking about fabricated listings on obscure Web sites. Oyo has posted Palette and Collection O listings on reputable sites like Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Trip.com and others.

So, what’s actually happening here?

Why has Oyo created doppelgangers? Why “Palette” and “Collection O”?

Well, put simply, it’s because a lot of people think Oyo sucks.

Online reviews of Oyo are brutal, and travelers pay attention to online reviews. They tend to avoid bad hotels unless the price point is irresistible.

Oyo appears to be testing the waters for a hotel rebrand. While that’s a legitimate strategy, the missing element in the current drama is all-important: Disclosure. You know, transparency. The old-timey word is “honesty.”

Any and all trust in Oyo (or Palette or Collection O) is gone when listings involve clear misrepresentations of the hotel as it really exists. Not only are the names nowhere to be found on or in the physical building, doctored photos are used to show off features of the hotel.

The hotel names aren’t completely made up, by the way.

Palette, for example, is owned by Oyo’s parent company, formerly Oravel Stays, now Prism. Prism operates a number of hotel brands, including OYO, Motel 6, Townhouse, Sunday and Palette. Our sources say there have been ongoing internal discussions about rebranding Oyo Las Vegas to Sunday.

Founded in India in 2012 by Ritesh Agarwal, Oyo started as a budget hotel and travel-tech brand and has since expanded internationally.

In Oct. 2025, we broke the story that Oyo’s operator, Highgate Hotels, was booted out by Oyo Hotels corporate following a cybersecurity incident. The place has reportedly been a bit of an operational mess ever since.

Is it possible to come up with a name even worse than Oyo? Oyo: “Hold our beer.”

So, is marketing Oyo under different names merely confusing or is it fraud? How about bait-and-switch?

Fraud generally involves proving intentional deception, and we don’t know Oyo’s intent.

Nevada law prohibits knowingly making false representations about the “source, affiliation, characteristics, quality, style or model of services, as well as advertising services with an intent not to sell them as advertised.” If a listing gives travelers the impression Palette is a separate or newly renovated hotel when it is actually the existing Oyo hotel, the owners of Oyo are playing with fire.

While this scenario may scream bait-and-switch as most people understand the term, it probably doesn’t qualify in the strict legal sense. Nevada’s bait-and-switch statute is fairly specific. It generally involves advertising goods or services the seller doesn’t actually intend to provide, then steering the customer toward something else, imposing undisclosed conditions or substituting less favorable terms.

That doesn’t exactly describe what’s happening here.

There’s no doubt, though, that what Oyo is doing qualifies as misleading.

Don’t get us started about how Oyo includes a photo of the Las Vegas Convention Center (nearly four miles away) in its travel site listings.

Nevada has an entire chapter of law devoted to deceptive trade practices. We are not a lawyer, but we’d guess there’s some potential legal exposure and liability on the part of Oyo here.

Oyo might consider this a market test, or some kind of “stealth rebranding” or “parallel distribution identity,” but if we book a hotel called Palette, and that hotel doesn’t exist, we have a different term for it: f’ing bullshit. (Note: We’re pretty sure we can say the f-word on Casino.org, but our mother reads our stories, and we’d prefer she not have a stroke.)

The folks at Oyo might be hucksters, but at least they’re detail-oriented.

Oyo probably does need to shed some baggage by rebranding, but a rebrand doesn’t make the product any better just by virtue of a name change. This isn’t a case of putting lipstick on a pig; it’s a pig pretending to be a peacock. Apologies to pigs. We did not invent this saying. We’d have gone with “polishing a turd,” but our mom is still reading our story, so just forget this ever happened.

Travelers shouldn’t have to conduct a forensic investigation to figure out where they’re staying.

They shouldn’t learn the truth only when they arrive at their destination.

We, too, enjoy manipulating photos. Then again, we are not an international budget hotel company.

This isn’t just bad optics. It’s a sham, and Oyo needs to rectify this situation ASAP. Unethical behavior as a hotel operator is one thing, but Oyo also has a casino. The standards of conduct are much, much higher.

Dubious business practices perk up the ears of gaming regulators and can place a casino’s gaming license in jeopardy. If public humiliation isn’t enough to motivate Oyo to get its house in order, the threat of regulatory scrutiny or potentially losing its gaming license certainly should be.