Oyster's schtick when it debuted to much fanfare in June was that it would hire experienced staffers to stay in hotels and write reviews, giving it a competitive advantage against user-submitted sites like TripAdvisor.com. Sure enough, the site hired 20 reporters and at least three editors—veterans of the New York Times, Money, Fast Company, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and all sorts of other former lions of print—to fly around all the time and stay at hotels. "We pay for all the expenses, the plane ticket, taxis, meals, rooms and, of course, salaries and benefits," co-founder Elie Seidman told the New York Times in June. He added that he hoped that by the end of 2010, he'd have 150 full-time staffers.

Well, that couldn't last very long, could it? After just under two quarters of operation, the site has engaged in what we hear are massive layoffs: 75% of staff is gone, our tipster says. A spokeswoman for Oyster confirms the layoffs, but says the 75% figure is laughably high. She declined to offer the accurate numbers, or say how many staffers the site currently employs. UPDATE: Oyster's rep got back to us with figures that indicate the site laid off one-third of its payroll, though the mix of full-time and temp staffers isn't clear: "At our 2009 production peak, we had more than 30 people, full-time and temporary. As a result of both economic conditions in the market and our decisions to slow our rate of new market additions after 18 months of torrid growth, we now have more than 20 people — full time and temporary."

In a statement, Seidman said Oyster was just limiting its coverage area:

After a burst of massive growth over the past 18 months, we've covered a very large percentage of the U.S. leisure market with a product that has been incredibly well received. In order to focus on winning in the markets we've already covered, we've decided to slightly slow our rate of new market coverage.

(That 18 months figure must include a lengthy pre-launch "burst of massive growth," because it hasn't been 18 months since Oyster launched in June of this year.)

Anyway, if you're a reporter terrified of losing your job and dreaming of an online gig where you get paid to travel and stay in luxury hotels and write about it, that escape hatch just closed. Maybe it's time to think about law school.

UPDATE: Two sources confirm that 17 staffers got the axe at Oyster, including 11 reporters. It's still not clear whether that constitutes 75% or 33% of payroll or somewhere in between, but it's a huge chunk of the site's editorial staff. Four reporters remain, we're told. To make matters worse, one tipster says the company sent eight non-editorial staffers on an all-expenses trip to Jamaica last month, which was explained as a gift in lieu of bonuses. And they were buying everybody free lunches every day until late October, when they apparently realized they needed to stop spending money and start firing everybody. One former Oyster reporter writes, "This is a sinking ship, and a severe case of entrepreneurial hubris. Shame."

If you know the details on who got fired, or how many people it was, let us know.

The question presents itself: What the shit do you think you're talking about, lady?

Her two big examples are the John Varvatos store at CBGBs, and the Whole Foods on the Bowery (which is the articles kicker). Great. She mentioned two places within three blocks from one another. Yeah, it sucks that CBGBs is dead, but that place sucked when it was dying and hey, at least Varvatos kept some of the original walls. It could be another Chase Bank, but, whatever.

Here's her thesis:

The problem for those who would like to see a return in New York to its edgy past is that Manhattan, as more than one New York-based blogger has claimed, is still "a gated community for the rich". The cultural critic Julian Brash has complained that under Bloomberg the citizens of New York have been turned into consumers - it is a place where everything is about what can be bought and what can be sold.

Okay, fine. Manhattan's really expensive, blah blah blah. Bankers run everything, blah blah blah. Everything in New York can be bought. And? This city was built by hyper-capitalists, it's why there's so much goddamn money here. Old hat. Certain things about New York absolutely suck and will always keep sucking worse and worse. And let's get one thing straight: people have been saying things about New York sucking for as long as New York's been around. If you read Monocle magazine, which this essay is basically ripped out of, this is like, every issue. This has long been the party line of travel press types—especially ones from abroad—for at least three years. I mean, if you really want to go back, I believe Rolling Stone called New York the Hot Dead Zone in their inaugural Hot List issue. In 1998. Saying New York is no longer edgy hasn't been edgy in forever.

The sequel to this piece is when she inevitably says that Berlin is starting to get really, really hip these days too. Pretty much anybody who went through Ellis Island and didn't stay probably had some sentiment along the lines of "this place sucks." According to the Daily News, one of our presidents basically told us to stick this city up our collective asses (look where he is, now: dead).

But—and I'm sure others have their reasons—I live here because, quite frankly (A) there's still nowhere else in America like it, and like many other people here, I have some sick/awesome compulsion that makes this grind of living here that much more attractive to me than anywhere else and (B) it's still got better stuff than everywhere else in America. Yeah, fuckin' stuff. Awesome stuff.

Now.

Can we quickly go over the reasons London—a nice city, sure—sucks compared to New York? Great:

• Your food sucks. It all tastes like ass until American chefs take two months to do better what you've spent hundreds of years sucking at.
  
  
• The service in your restaurants sucks, because you have to instruct people how to tip by putting a mandatory charge on their tab, like many other countries that do this. Which is the wrong way of doing this, which is why every server you will every have in London will probably be an asshole.
  
  
• Your theater sucks. War Horse—no, really, War Horse—is the best thing you have up right now. Anything good you have on the West End came from us. And don't bring up fucking Billy Elliot.
  
  
• Your nightlife is just stupid. Pubs close at 11, our bars don't close until four. Who goes to bed at 11? Are you serious? So you guys open up clubs that close at 2AM that have two kinds of people in them: the kind who get unceremoniously drunk and piss on everything, or the places Prince Harry goes. And who wants to go there? Also, you only play American music. You think Kings of Leon are the Second Coming of Christ. The Kings of Leon play our bar mitzvahs, goddamnit. By the way: most of those rappers you guys play on repeat (and not even the good ones...50 Cent?!) still live in New York. Our clubs and nightlife might have their issues, but they blow yours out of the water. You guys wouldn't know what to do with The Beatrice Inn if it crawled up your nose in a $100 bill.
  
  
• Nobody knows where anything is in London. Seriously. It's like the worst parts of the West Village for an entire city. Everything is higgly-piggly or whatever dumb word you have for it. We live on a grid. A grid. You guys have the dumbest civic planning this side of kids eating Legos.
  
  
• OH. Don't get me wrong. Our subways suck, for sure. But at least they're supposed to work after midnight, and don't cost half our income to ride. Also, an Oystercard? That just sounds stupid. Who's running your design schemes, Lewis Carroll? Stupid. Oh, and, you wanna talk about EDGY? How about our D-Trains getting stabby again, edgy? Exactly.
  
  
• You guys have never had a nice day of weather in the history of the universe. Seriously. The only person Madonna has to compete with for causing a scene is the fucking sun. It's yellow, it's in the sky, sometimes, it...nevermind. Have you even been here in September? It's like Central Park is trying to get in your pants and get you off, the weather's so goddamned nice.
  
  
• Oh, and the pound is stupid-expensive. Like everything else in your city.
  
  
• Your tabloid newspapers make the New York Post look like The Paris Review.
  
  
• And Whole Foods on the Bowery, sure, Whole Foods sucks. But it's in a pretty great location, and, fuck that, you know what sucks worse? Sainsbury's. Sainsbury's suuuuuuuucks. Which goes back to your food sucking.
  
  
• Do you have Brooklyn? Do you even know what a Brooklyn is? No, not David Beckham's son. You're stupid, shut up. [Quiet Moment: The article didn't mention Brooklyn once, but didn't refer to Manhattan exclusively. Go figure.]
  
  
• London's celebrities are all on Big Brother and fucking suck. They're mouthbreathing idiots. They make Tinsley Mortimer look like Jackie Kennedy.
  
  
• You guys have soccer—yeah, I called it soccer, goddamnit—teams. Multiple ones. Great. We have two baseball teams (including the 2009 World Series Champions), football teams (Including the 2008 Super Bowl Champions), hockey teams (I'm sure they Won Something Great recently), and a basketball team. All of them except for the Knicks could smash every London soccer player. Nothing else, just "smash" them.
  
  
• There is one—and only one—good song about Foggy London Town. There are as many songs about New York as there are New Yorkers, and most of them are awesome.

Anything else? Oh, yeah, did Samuel Motherfucking Jackson just buy an apartment next to your boss? No? Exactly.

Shut up. New York is awesome.

Tell us, Nomadic Family Traveler Jeanne Dee, how is it that you live your whole life just traipsing about the world with your family, on some sort of nonstop vacation? The answer is "budgeting." For just $25K per year off savings and investments, these people hopscotch about the globe while all the youth of England lay around like bumps on a log without any jobs and nobody in Iraq can make a dollar unless they're blackmailing Blackwater for it.

Also now's not a bad time for a luxury Caribbean vacation. Just FYI.

Who cares if burglaries are down because everyone is home, unemployed? Right here in the US of motherfucking A, the average Joe can't get one of the scant few jobs just because of a 20 year-old conviction for threatening two bums with a hairbrush, which was totally self-defense. If you'd been carrying a US Army ID card, you never would have had a problem in the first place, because muggers would let you off scott free, because of patriotism and a kinship between killers.

Unless you are personally named Norris Henry, 76 year-old Rikers Island guard turned New York Lottery winner, I feel pity for you in this time of economic woe, in America. If it makes you feel any better, China's looking just fine. Go there. Call it a vacation. Never come back.
[Pic via]

In pre-recessionary times, business travelers were provided with "expense accounts" that allowed them to "travel" to "hotels" for "meetings." Now businesses have modified slightly, so you go to the hotel "down the street" and go into the "telepresence suite" and "look at the people you are 'meeting' with, on a video screen" and "pretend" it's not humiliating how broke you are. Hey, at least you didn't have to go all the way to "Asia," which is the last place hotels are "open!"

Visualizing yourself doing something more promising than what you're actually doing is a proven way to make it through the recession without offing yourself. Pretend that your seasonal holiday job at the mall, as an elf, is a real career that will never end, just like Christmas itself, which happens every day. Pretend that you can just keep stealing money from your retail job forever, and it'll be just like if you worked for a hedge fund! If things go bad, you can always pull another daring helicopter heist. Pretend you'll have that money forever!

America will make-believe its way out of this recession yet.
[Pic via]

Among them is our favorite pundit-manque and Peggy Noonan-interpreter Chris Lehmann, who as of "about three hours ago" was stuck in Baltimore, trying in vain to get to Philadelphia, and passing time by viciously attacking defenseless wealthy people. His wife Ana Marie Cox appears to have reached her destination first, and is frantically looking for a bar in the station, to no avail. Other poor souls report a stuck train that's down to "one working bathroom," and restless noises are being made about "angry riders."

Sklar, citing Twitter reports, deduces that the problem is affecting more than one train on the D.C.-to-Boston route, and lays the blame on an electrical problem in Rhode Island. But a "tweet" from this one guy published after the Amtrak snafu began suggests that the problems are cascading: "Wow. My Acela train hit someone just outside of Philly. Bad luck for everyone. Terrible day for #Amtrak."

The 80-year-old made the announcement on his blog:

I am not yet certain whether I would advocate a travel boycott by others of the state of Arizona; I want to learn more about Arizona's gun laws and how they compare with those of other states. But I am shocked beyond measure by reports that earlier this week, nearly a dozen persons, including one with an assault rifle strapped about his shoulders and others with pistols in their hands or holsters, were openly congregating outside a hall at which President Obama was speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

For myself, without yet suggesting that others follow me in an open boycott, I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest. I not only believe such practices are a threat to the future of our democracy, but I am firmly convinced that they would also endanger my own personal safety there. And therefore I will cancel any plans to vacation or otherwise visit in Arizona until I learn more. And I will begin thinking about whether tourists should safeguard themselves by avoiding stays in Arizona.

According to the Phoenix, Arizona, police, people with guns including assault rifles do not need permits in Arizona, but can simply carry such weapons with them, openly and brazenly, when they gather to protest a speaker at a public event. The police also acknowledge that about a dozen people carrying guns, including one with an AR-15 assault rifle, milled about outside the event at which President Obama spoke.

I would feel as I do regardless of the political identity of the speaker whom these thugs attempted to intimidate. The continued tolerance of extremists carrying guns is a frightening development which strikes at the heart of the political process and endangers the ability to carry out a reasoned debate. Is there any responsible citizen of the United States who believes that people should carry guns to a public debate or speech? If Ronald Reagan were delivering a political talk in Phoenix, Arizona, would they have felt it was proper for protestors with guns to mill about outside the hall from which he would leave?

Whatever, unless you're a golfer or college student looking to score drugs and easy ass, there's really no need to visit Arizona anyway. So good on you Arthur Frommer.

Various stories have used the verb "appeared," "opened," and "developed" to describe the motherfucking hole in the god damn airplane what was way the hell up in the sky, doubtless causing all aboard to pee their pants at least a little. This is a somewhat more vivid description:

"All of the sudden, the loudest noise I ever heard came out of nowhere," he said. "There was no pop, no creak, no explosion-like noise. There was just a loud roar. It took me a couple of seconds to wake up. I got the baseball cap out of my face and I look up and there's the sun coming through the ceiling. ...I saw sky where I shouldn't be seeing it."

Southwest officials say they're stumped thus far as to why their cocksucking plane blew a hole, for Christ's sake, thousands of feet above the ground. But the passengers say they cheered and high-fived the captain after he landed, as you would imagine, since he's the guy who saved their ass from that life-sucking hole in the Jesus-loving aircraft, sucking and roaring and trying to pull them right out of the flippin' plane so they could fall thousands upon thousands of feet to their deaths.

The dude is no Sully but you're hellafied right he deserves a high five, or whatever the heck else he wants. Shit. Airplanes should not have holes.
[USAT. Pic via]

Madge's semi-impromptu throwdown involved bringing a Jackson "impersonator" (probably one of her dancers) on stage to do a few key Jackson dance moves. "Let's give it up to one of the greatest artists the world has ever known: Michael Jackson. Long live the king," she noted. It's strange, if only because of Madonna's Warriors-esque crew standing with her in freeze-pose while the dancer kicks it to a medley involving "Billy Jean" and the key "Mama Se" bridge in "Wanna Be Startin' Something" that can make even the most spatially braindead person want to engage in some kind of tribal pop-infused raindance at the whim of Jackson's song. It's true.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Meanwhile, TMZ reports that British Airways is selling out flights at an astounding pace for Brits who're coming to L.A. for the Jackson memorial at the Staples Center, direct and indirect. Thoughts and fair warning to British travelers: if you get stuck in Denver on the way to L.A., don't say we didn't warn you. Unless your idea of a good time is a Rockies game, we suggest you properly assess the risk involved, here.

Swingers clubs—Try Anchorena, Buenos Aires' premier boliche swinger. Enjoy the kitschy "four life-sized wooden totems of nude men and women, their genitals poised above the center of the dance floor" to get you in the mood. "Forget the tango - these days, Argentina swings," Mark Sanford.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Gay saunas—Unikus Spa is one of the city's most popular gay meeting points, where you can go to descontracturantes y relax, if you know what we mean, Mark Sanford.

Sex spas—A Full Spa offers "Hydrotherapy Pool, Labyrinth /Individual Boxes, XXX Videos, etc." Etc. means whatever you want it to mean, Mark Sanford!

Glory Holes—At Tom's at Viamonte 638, you can go from the Leather Basement to the DVD Booths to the Glory Holes, and back—if you dare, Mark Sanford!

"Publishing"—Leonos is a "publishing" agency that "doesn't do anything" except link its hot male "models" with interested "clients" like you. What you choose to "do" with the "model" is "up to two consenting adults," Mark Sanford.

Around your hotel—"Cutty Sark is a well known bar...guys will have no problems arranging erotic services with the girls here, especially if they're staying at El Conquistador." Club Black is nice, too. Ring the front desk, Mark Sanford!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Drugs—Cocaine here is the same price as Miller Lite is back in South Carolina, Mark Sanford!

Reports MSNBC:

A new study has found the air in Madrid and Barcelona is laced with at least five drugs - most prominently cocaine.

The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations, a government institute, said on its Web site Thursday that in addition to cocaine, they found trace amounts of amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids and lysergic acid - a relative of LSD - in two air-quality control stations, one in each city.

The study also revealed that levels of narcotics in the Spanish air seemed to increase on the weekends and near college campuses. Shocking! Further, it found that at peak times, such as those infamous Spanish weekends (Anyone ever been to Ibiza? YEEHAW!), cocaine concentrations in the air reached levels of 850 picograms per cubic air meter. What's a picogram? Beats the shit out of me! But Rome only registered 100 picograms of cocaine per cubic air meter in a 2007 study.

Reading this reminded me of a girl I dated about four years ago who went to live in Madrid for a year for a graduate program. The girl who left the U.S. to study in Spain was fun, she liked to drink a bit, but she was, by all accounts, quite normal as a partier for someone living in New York. But the girl who came back to the country a year later had transformed into a damn aardvark for cocaine! Now it's all beginning to make sense!

Spanish Study Shows Cocaine in the Air in Madrid and Barcelona [MSNBC]

Anybody in their right mind would take the deal that Skadden, Arps offered to its lawyers: a third of their salary in exchange for taking the year off. But while Heather Eisenlord, of Skadden's banking group, takes off to "teach English to monks in Sri Lanka," North Carolina chicken farmers will be suffering financial distress! Their chickens offered them not paid vacations, but bankruptcy. "I paid a lot of money for these chicken houses, but they aren't worth a nickel right now," said one chicken farmer, as a single rooster crowed in the distance, mournfully.

Where is the justice? When Heather Eisenlord, god bless her, flies off to "bring solar power to remote parts of the Himalayas," countless scores of laid-off olds will be unable to find a job, because young punk "hiring managers" can't deal with someone older than them. Even though the olds are the most qualified workers of all!

Where is the justice, we ask, when Heather Eisenlord—as is her right!—spends the day at Barnes & Noble "stocking her apartment in Brooklyn with Lonely Planet travel guides," while Loganville, GA can't afford to build a park, and you can't leave your car anywhere in Laredo, TX without having it stolen, and you sure can't have nice things in Piedmont, CA, because desperate thieves break into homes for sale just to rip off the meager furnishings and trade them for bread, or perhaps a sliver of cheese?

We don't know where the justice is. But we all wish we were Heather Eisenlord. [Pic via]

Hitch was beaten by local thugs affiliated with the crazy Syrian Social Nationalist Party, an either left- or right-wing group wishing to see basically all of the middle east joined as "Greater Syria." All because—like our very own Poster Boy!—he defaced a poster. Unfortunately it was a poster for the SSNP, and Hitch defaced it by writing "Fuck the SSNP" on it (that's the kind of brilliant rhetoric he's famous for) and there were some SSNP members right across the street, and they beat him up. According to this blog, "he is still walking with a limp."

According to this awesome blog, it's because Hitch was at the wrong bar, in the wrong neighborhood.

MoDo is in top, infuriating, faux-self-loathing form. She spends the first several paragraphs wondering rhetorically whether anyone could justify spending thousands of dollars at a pricey luxury spa in Miami Beach during these hard times. Then she goes ahead and does. With the NYT picking up the tab, and paying her for her precious insight as well, we have to assume.

My mom always warned me that there was something immoral about a $5 cup of coffee, a $1.75 bottle of water, a $27 fifth of bourbon and a $40 candle. I’m sure the $500 pizhichil massage (without tip) offered by Canyon Ranch would have appalled her. It made my friend Alessandra, who had the “body ritual,” featuring two masseuses squeezing pieces of linen dipped in “medicinal oil” all over her body for 80 minutes, cringe a bit as well. “I felt like a fat Mafioso being serviced by Thai hookers,” she confessed afterward.

Later MoDo gets more massages, drinks booze, and goes out the town with her "pal," the Miami police chief, all while chuckling about how disconcerting her situation is, but hey, she can't be stopped from partying! (Is this why people hate "snark?")

A 950-square-foot, one-bedroom Intracoastal suite starts at $350 a night; a 920-square-foot poolside suite with one king bed starts at $450; a 1,200-square-foot oceanfront suite with two bedrooms starts at $1,000.

Meanwhile, back on the other ranch:

The Times will not subsidize or reimburse the cost of food delivered to the newsroom for departmental or staff meetings, without approval from News Admin. This includes departments or bureaus charging to their P-cards or to the newspaper the cost of bagel runs, supplies of bottled water, catered luncheons or any group meals for their staffs, whether the department is ordering from outside caterers and restaurants, or the cafeteria on the 14th floor. If a department is having a luncheon meeting, for example, editors should encourage participants to brown bag, bring down their own food from the cafeteria or share the cost of outside delivery.

You can't put a price on quality travel journalism, people.

[NYT, NYO]

As we all know from the classic film Air Force One, the president flies around the world on a specially equipped Boeing 747 with a lot of TVs and a parachute bay and bulletproof walls and some colored wires that dump most but not all the fuel if you cut the right one (green).

But Airbus would like to give Barack Obama a new plane! Airbus is preparing to offer the incoming president an A380 superjumbo. The only problem? Boeing made the current plane, and they are, of course, an American airplane company and major defense contractor (based in Chicago, no less!), and the Airbus A380 is Europe's flagship jet. Of course this is why Airbus waited until Frenchy Euro-loving foreigner Obama was in office before making the offer, because Bush wouldn't have accepted a dumb European plane.

Airbus also claims their plane—the biggest in the world!—is more fuel-efficient than the 747, but, as we all learned just yesterday, Airbus planes are decided not bird-proof. Can we trust our president's life to an Airbus plane? A pigeon could take him down!

1. All executives are asked to fly one grade below what they're entitled to. Some have contractual provisions on air travel, and the company is not breaching any contracts. But we are being asked to use our discretion on this.

3. All executives are asked to stay in "B" level hotels. I'm told that Travel knows what this means.

Oh, they know what it means. The end is nigh. [NYO]

Karlin signed a contract for a book that was going to be tie-in for a new PBS series called "Spain ... on the Road Again," which starred flame-haired fatty celebuchef Batali and blonde actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

But in November 2007, a conflict arose when Mr. Pinsky allowed Mr. Batali to engage designers for the book, including one of Mr. Batali's relatives, instead of leaving the design to Mr. Karlin, as previously agreed, the lawsuit states. Mr. Karlin contends that Mr. Batali also expected him to write the book in its entirety, and refused to contribute recipes, pictures, or other material to the project, claiming to be too busy.

When Mr. Karlin asked to lessen his involvement in the book, the lawsuit states, Mr. Batali asked that the writer be fired from the project. He has not been paid, and is suing for $125,000, including the cost of two trips to Spain, according to the lawsuit.

Well, it sounds like Batali really flaked out here, and Karlin deserves to be paid for his hard work. Unless he's just making it up because he's, you know, a little bit of a dick.

[NYS; pic via NY]

The company had a big PR plan in place for the announcement: talking points, economic facts, carefully crafted statements. Which was all a big waste of time, because people are going to be pissed about losing their sacred bag-checking rights, high oil prices be damned:

"We understood that consumers would be frustrated with another fee," said Mike Flanagan, senior VP at Weber Shandwick, American's public-relations shop of record. "Precisely for that reason; we did our best to communicate the full impact that oil is having on our business." Predictably, the public had little sympathy...

Regardless of American's honesty, consumers were still angered by the fee. "It's only a matter of time before airlines begin charging for our carry-on bag," wrote one commenter on Chris Elliott's travel blog. Blogs such as Sky Talk gauged traveler reaction, including a flier who said that "they're trying to nickel and dime us for too many things."

Hey, Joe Public, you're right: It is only a matter of time before they start charging you for carry on bags. Along with food and everything else on planes these days. The alternative is to raise ticket prices. But of course, the airlines can't do that because of... populist outrage!

As hard as it is to sympathize with the airline industry, they deserve a little sympathy. They were the victim of an easy cheap shot by the national media, which cried "Not another price increase!" while knowing full well that revenue needs to go up one way or another. American's only mistake here was being the first one to put in this fee. Now that they've broken the cherry, watch as all their fellow airlines fall in line.

The littlest victims in all this: the poor flacks.

[Ad Age]