Travelers booking rooms at what they believed were two different hotels near the Las Vegas Strip say they instead ended up walking into the same run-down property: OYO Hotel & Casino. The 696-room hotel at 115 E. Tropicana Ave. is accused of marketing its rooms under two alternate identities, Palette Las Vegas and Collection O, complete with AI-altered exterior photos that swapped out the real signage for fake branding.
The allegations, first detailed by the New York Post, describe listings for Palette Las Vegas at 117 E. Tropicana Ave. and Collection O Las Vegas at both 115 and 119 E. Tropicana Ave. appearing across Booking.com, Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Hotels.com and Trip.com. When traveler Ariana Patiño tried to avoid OYO altogether and booked a stay at Palette instead, she reportedly ended up at the same property anyway. An OYO front-desk worker reportedly told a guest, “That’s us. This is OYO,” and claimed the alternate listing had been posted to see which name would gain more traction.
Fake Names, Real Complaints
According to the Post’s reporting, Collection O was listed with no casino, despite OYO having one on site, per the Travelocity listing, and Travelocity described Collection O as a three-minute walk from OYO Hotel & Casino, even though neither Collection O nor Palette signage physically appears on the building. Collection O carried a Travelocity rating of just 4 out of 10, with 10 of 15 reviewers giving it the lowest possible score, and its oldest available review on that platform dates back to July 2024. One Trip.com reviewer said their Collection O room had not been cleaned before check-in and described a broken elevator, cracked floors and a shuttered gift shop, and left the property immediately after arriving.
OYO itself has fared little better under its own name, carrying a 1.7-star Yelp rating and a stream of complaints about dirty rooms, broken elevators and malfunctioning air conditioners, the Post reports. Guest Jennifer Gay told the outlet that a blacklight revealed “human enthusiasm all over the walls” of her room, that the mattress smelled terrible, and branded OYO the worst hotel in Las Vegas.
Corporate Ties Behind the Alternate Brands
Palette is not some unrelated competitor undercutting OYO for business — it is a brand owned by OYO’s parent company, now known as PRISM. The corporate entity formerly called Oravel Stays rebranded itself as PRISM in September 2025, operating an umbrella of hotel brands that includes OYO, Palette, Collection O, Sunday, Townhouse and Motel 6 across more than 35 countries, according to Hotel Dive. Collection O is also offered through OYO’s own booking network rather than existing as some standalone chain.
The local blog Vital Vegas has suggested OYO may be testing replacement brand names while weighing whether to shed its battered reputation entirely, though the blog has also acknowledged that OYO’s actual intent remains unknown. Vital Vegas further noted that the alleged scheme may not meet Nevada’s legal definition of bait-and-switch, and there has been no official finding that OYO committed fraud or violated state law. In an August 4 response to an online guest review, an account operating under the Palette name acknowledged that incorrect hotel names, a lack of physical exterior signage, and non-functioning elevators were serious operational issues undergoing urgent remediation, the same outlet reported.
A Property With a Rough History
The Tropicana Avenue building has cycled through identities for decades. It opened in July 1973 as a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge, operated as Hotel San Remo from 1989 to 2006, then became Hooters Casino Hotel from 2006 to 2019, before OYO and its former operator Highgate Hotels bought it for $135 million in August 2019, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The property sits roughly 1,000 feet east of the Strip near Tropicana Avenue.
That history took a darker turn last year. Court disclosures showed the January 2025 cyberattack on OYO Las Vegas was carried out by the LockBit 3.0 ransomware group, which leaked 30 gigabytes of internal files, including guest records and casino operations data, on the dark web before breach notices went out in October 2025, per Action Network. OYO has claimed Highgate was responsible for maintaining IT safeguards under their management agreement. That same October, OYO corporate ousted Highgate following the attack, which exposed personal and financial data belonging to roughly 4,700 guests and employees, according to GGB Magazine, and the two companies are now embroiled in mutual legal actions in New York and Delaware.
Legal Exposure and a Shaky Market
If regulators were to conclude that the AI-altered photos and alternate hotel names amounted to misleading consumer representations, Nevada Revised Statutes Chapter 598 allows state or county prosecutors to pursue civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation for knowing false advertising or deceptive trade practices, per FindLaw. Federal rules finalized by the Federal Trade Commission in August 2024 also empower regulators to seek civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation against businesses that create or spread fake or misleading online representations, including fabricated property profiles.
The controversy lands as Las Vegas hotels face a tougher market overall. The city welcomed 38.5 million visitors in 2025, with average citywide occupancy at 80.3% across 150,300 hotel rooms, but overall visitation fell 7.5% year-over-year while average daily room rates dropped 5% to $183.52, according to the Las Vegas Sun. Strip revenue per available room fell even further, down 10.9% to $149.13 in 2025, the largest percentage drop among the top 25 U.S. hotel markets, even as Strip room rates held near $199.79.
PRISM has meanwhile been expanding aggressively, completing a $525 million acquisition of G6 Hospitality in late 2024 that added roughly 1,500 Motel 6 and Studio 6 locations to its U.S. franchise network, and the company filed an updated prospectus in June 2026 as it prepares for a multi-billion-dollar initial public offering. The California Post reached out to OYO Hotel & Casino for comment on the alternate listings.
