Thread by @SKisContent

I dug into the Oyo Hotels Marilyn Monroe story and made some puzzling discoveries. Thread.

1/30

Oyo Hotels CEO Ritesh Agarwal was quoted in a Bloomberg article saying that putting up Marilyn Monroe posters in the hotels improved revenue, because the images elevated the hotels to boutique status in guest's minds. 2/30

This had me curious about how that worked. Were guests paying more per room, or was the occupancy rate higher? How is it that no other hotel had discovered this before? Did Oyo test different Marilyn images? Mostly I was curious which images of Marilyn were they using. 3/30

I decided to find out which portraits of Marilyn Oyo was using by looking at the room images on Oyo's website. Agarwal mentioned they started in Wichita Falls, so that's where I started. The Oyo site said there were only 4 hotels in the town, so it seemed like short work. 4/30

This was my first time looking at pictures of a Oyo hotel. The first hotel had what I now recognize as the Oyo livery, with a red accent wall and a white bedspread with a red band at the foot. However, none of the room photos on the website contained any images of Monroe. 5/30

I tried a second hotel. It isn't labeled a "Oyo hotel" on the site, and it doesn't have the Oyo look. Agarwal said that Oyo has been signing up properties at a breakneck pace, as so this one may not yet have been fitted with the Oyo look. Anyway, no Marilyn Monroe here. 6/30

The third Wichita Falls hotel was the same story. No Oyo look and no Marilyn Monroe. 7/30

The fourth Oyo property in Wichita Falls is part of their Townhouse chain. I wasn't expecting to see Marilyn here and I didn't. I was nonplussed. Where were the Marilyn pictures that Agarwal had spoken about? 8/30

On a whim, I searched for "Marilyn Monroe hotel boutique." That turned up a few hotels that featured Marilyn-themed rooms, including one that had a bed that looked like the Oyo colors. 9/30

However, none of them were Oyo hotels. One, the Hollywood Roosevelt, bills itself as a boutique hotel. I wondered where the disconnect was. I didn't think Agarwal had made it up, so there had to another explanation. 10/30

Agarwal also said they copied the idea of Marilyn portraits to other properties. So I went back to Oyo's website for other cities. I searched on Texas and Dallas came up. The site said there were 10 hotels there, and I looked at every picture of every hotel. No Marilyn. 11/30

I thought I'd try neighboring states, so I looked at Tulsa. No Marilyn Monroe. 12/30

I decided to be more systematic and first look at every hotel in Texas, so next I went to Houston. Scrolling down the list of hotels, I saw it! Tiny as it was in the sidebar, it was the unmistakable image of one of the most iconic Americans of the last 70 years. 13/30

However, it was the only one of 10 Houston hotels that had Marilyn Monroe on the walls. (I love the lobby of the one in Shenandoah Woodlands Mall!) 14/30

I quickly moved on to looking at other Texas cities. There were no Marilyns in Irving or San Antonio, but I again got a hit in Texarkana. There was Marilyn Monroe, straight ahead. 15/30

I should clarify that it was Texarkana, TX, because there is also an Oyo in Texarkana, AR, as I discovered at the bottom of the Texas hotel's details page. 16/30

The other Texarkana hotel also had pictures of Marilyn on the walls! Two hotels with Marilyn Monroe portraits in one town. Was it Texarkana and not Wichita Falls that Ritesh Agarwal spoke of? With 44,000 hotels and growing, it could be easy to get confused. 17/30

At this point, I wanted to know which images of Marilyn Monroe Oyo was using. As I listed each Marilyn portrait, I noticed that there was one image that was not her. It's prominent in this Houston hotel room, but I hadn't paid attention at first. Who was this woman? 18/30

The woman next to Marilyn Monroe on Oyo's walls is 21-year old Ingrid Bergman, in a publicity still from the 1936 movie Intermezzo. I have no idea why this particular image of Bergman is on Oyo's wall. I found her in the Svenska Filmdatabas. 19/30
svenskfilmdatabas.se/wp-content/upl…

(I am intrigued by the picture of Ingrid Bergman because it's from a movie she made in Sweden, years before she became famous for Casablanca, Notorious, Gaslight or others. However, it caught the attention of David O. Selznick, who recast her in an American remake in 1939) 20/30

Having come this far, I thought I'd check Tripadvisor for customer photos of the rooms with Marilyn pictures. I didn't find any customer photos, only management-uploaded ones, but I noticed something strange. For each Marilyn room image, there was another without Marilyn. 21/30

Now, one might think that the images of hotel rooms with and without Marilyn Monroe's portraits were before and after images, except that they are identical in every other way, from shot angle to shadows on the wall. 22/30

In these images of the front desk, the time on the clock is the same. So if they are before and after images, someone went to a lot of trouble to set up the identical shot. 23/30

Here are two more example pairs from the Texarkana North hotel where the picture of Marilyn is there in one photo and not there in the other, and both versions were uploaded to Tripadvisor. The fire alarm in the one without shows some additional smudging. 24/30

The same is true for the Houston hotel. The Tripadvisor images of the Oyo hotel rooms come in identical pairs except for the portraits. Why were there two versions created, and why were they both uploaded to Tripadvisor? And why is there one exception to this rule? 25/30

In all previous examples, the hotel photos were identical down to the last detail, except for the portraits of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. However, in this pair of photos from the Oyo hotel in Houston, the photos are not identical. 26/30

It's not just the cropping. Look at the phone on the desk. In the picture with Marilyn, it's at the edge of the side-table. In the picture without Marilyn, it's sitting a few inches in from the edge. Why do these pictures break the pattern? 27/30

So to summarize what I have seen:
1. Contrary to what Ritesh Agarwal said, there are no Marilyn Monroe portraits in the Oyo hotels in Wichita Falls, but they are present in Houston and Texarkana. This isn't a scandal, it could be an honest mistake. 28/30

(Or else, like Norma Jean's made up name, Wichita Falls sounds better than Texarkana.) 29/30
Summary continued:
2. Amidst the Marilyn pictures is also a surprising picture of Ingrid Bergman.

Summary continued:
3. On Tripadvisor, the owner-uploaded pictures of rooms with Marilyn Monroe/Ingrid Bergman portraits are accompanied by another one where the portraits are erased. However, in at leaset one case, the "without" version is a real reshoot. 30/30