Many travelers go online to look for reviews and pictures of hotels they're interested in staying in. But what they find is not always honest. In some cases, hotels pay for positive reviews, and the beautiful pictures of hotel rooms, lobbies and pools posted online may be fakes. A serene pool, a stunning waterfall surrounded by luxurious shops, and a bed made up perfectly -- these are images hotels like to showcase. But a bed made up with rumpled linens is what a reviewer from the travel review website Oyster.com found when she stayed at a luxurious New York City hotel, not the room photo that appeared on the hotel's website. On Oyster.com, the company posts what it calls photo fakeouts, side-by-side pictures showing the staged images the hotel wants you to see, and what the anonymous reviewers really found during their stay. Elie Seidman, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oyster, says hotels use a variety of tricks to make their properties look more appealing. At the extreme, it's actually cropping out buildings, cropping out phone wires, electric wires, making the pool seem bigger, said Seidman. So if you get down on your knees, get close to the pool, you crop out the edge, it's actually going to look a lot bigger. So when you arrive, it's a bathtub. In the brochure it looks like a beautiful pool. Oyster.com, which is a free website, has hotel reviews of 14 cities and islands, far less than its competitors, although the site is rapidly adding more hotels and more destinations to its database. Registration not required.