You may remember tales of Oyster.com’s big-deal launch about six months ago. Built like TripAdvisor but featuring “real” experts, the travel review site had a much-publicized $10 million budget and staff comprised of professional journalists, “world travelers, all.” It sounded fantastic — literally.

TripAdvisor works, you see, because it keeps its costs pretty low. Oyster.com balked at that philosophy, and now there’s nothing left but an empty shell.

Despite protestations from Oyster.com’s founders, Mediabistro and Gawker have both reported this week that the over-funded travel site is on its way down the tubes already. CEO and co-founder Elie Seidman told Mediabistro the plan was just to trim staff in order to hone in on the markets where the site has proved most successful — rather than expanding quickly into new markets as it had initially planned. To back up its “nothing to see here, just reorganizing” claims, the company was even posting jobs for positions such as VP of Marketing as recent as yesterday.

Now TFT has learned from a tipster that the company is indeed on its way out of business. “With execs paid six-figure salaries, bosses that micromanaged to the point of distrusting anything the editorial staff created, and the CEO’s office furniture from Crate and Barrel that totaled somewhere around $10k… all the lavish dinners and vacations were gonna bring the company down at some point,” according to our mole. Another tipster put the price of the CEO’s furniture at $17,000.

Billed by some as a haven for those who had been offed by so-called “traditional journalism,” and marketed by execs as a friendly and professional place to work (did we mention the budget?), Oyster.com’s latest round of layoffs — 17 folks were emailed the Sunday after Thanksgiving not to come into work on Monday (which brings it to ~30 layoffs/firings/forced departures in the past year) — proves it has been anything but.

“The company is trying to spin the whole tale by claiming some sort of financial strategy, but they are lying with most of their stats,” our tipster says. “Plus, they have the gall to put up job postings when the company is all but done for. I don’t want any naive applicant to be fooled into being a part of such a horrible endeavor. They are trying to squeeze any last ounce of juice out from the remaining editorial staff before they are — inevitably — laid off.”

Sorry, Oyster applicants, but it’s back to trying to crack that Mediabistro job board.

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