Las Vegas is known at times for being a place of questionable business practices and ethics, but this has to be a new low. There’s a “new” hotel in Las Vegas — except it doesn’t actually exist, and the photos used to market it are AI. Then guests end up actually staying at an old hotel that gets bad reviews. I can’t imagine this is even legal…
OYO Hotel Las Vegas & Palette Las Vegas look mighty similar
OYO Hotel and Casino Las Vegas is a budget friendly property that doesn’t generally get good reviews. On TripAdvisor, it’s ranked number 240 of 260 hotels in Las Vegas.
So here’s where the story gets interesting. If you go to online travel agencies like booking.com, you’ll see a new property named Palette Las Vegas. What does that have to do with OYO Las Vegas? Well, the two “properties” look remarkably similar.
Below is an exterior picture of OYO Las Vegas.
Below is an exterior picture of Palette Las Vegas.
Below is a picture of the OYO Las Vegas pool.
Below is a picture of the Palette Las Vegas pool.
Wild coincidence, eh? You want to know what’s even wilder? The properties have the same address — 117 E. Tropicana Avenue. What’s going on here? Did the OYO Las Vegas rebrand as the Palette Las Vegas? No, the answer is much more absurd than that…
Palette Las Vegas is a completely imaginary hotel
A TikToker shared her experience searching for hotels on booking.com. She specifically didn’t want to book the OYO Las Vegas due to the bad reviews, particularly around cleanliness. So she decided to book Palette Las Vegas, figuring that it looked a bit nicer, while still being reasonably priced.
She received the confirmation, and upon arriving in Las Vegas, she headed to the hotel. However, when she arrived at the address on the confirmation, she only saw OYO Las Vegas, and not Palette Las Vegas. So she kept circling the block, thinking maybe she was missing something, before calling the hotel. They told her to proceed into OYO for check-in.
So once at check-in, she asked what was going on, given that they booked Palette Las Vegas. She was reportedly told that Palette Las Vegas doesn’t exist, and “they just put the listing up to see which ad would gain more traction.”
In other words, Palette Las Vegas is fake, and AI images are being used to pretend it’s a property that’s different than OYO Las Vegas.
I mean, I’m no lawyer, but I can’t imagine there’s any planet on which this is legal, and isn’t outright false advertising. What I’m curious about is the extent to which online travel agencies are in on this, vs. the hotel owners just trying to pull a fast one on them as well.
Bottom line
OYO Las Vegas gets pretty poor reviews, and obviously that’s impacting demand for the property. Rather than improving, the hotel seems to be trying a new sales tactic. One of Las Vegas’ newest hotels is the Palette Las Vegas, which… doesn’t actually exist. It’s actually OYO Las Vegas, but with a new name and AI altered photos.
So when you book Palette Las Vegas, you’re actually staying at OYO Las Vegas, because it literally doesn’t exist. This is just insane, and I have to imagine that even the online travel agencies are getting scammed here. I don’t necessarily think that highly of their ethics, but I can’t imagine they’re open to just selling totally fake hotels in this way.
What do you make of this Las Vegas hotel scam?
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