I first encountered the anomaly while scraping API data for a travel automation project. I was filtering for "boutique hotels with over 4.8 stars and under $150 a night" in the Caribbean. The script returned a result for "Paradise Hotel, Cayo Largo." The coordinates were null. The address was a PO Box in Delaware. The phone number rang to a fax machine.
After three weeks of digging through WHOIS records, expired SSL certificates, and geolocation metadata from the lobby photos, I found the source. The photos are stock images from a 2007 issue of Caribbean Travel & Life magazine. The PO Box in Delaware belongs to a shell company that also owns the rights to the domain name "EternalSunset[.]net." hotel paradise online
A user claiming to be a former intern for a famous new media artist (think Hito Steyerl or Cory Arcangel) posted on a now-deleted thread that "Hotel Paradise" is a long-term performance piece. The goal? To see how many people will try to check into a hotel that doesn't exist. The 47 reviews are written by the artist’s collective. The phone number leads to a voice recording of waves crashing. If this is art, it is the most boring and terrifying art on the internet. I first encountered the anomaly while scraping API