Accor Hotels and Hostels (Base Backpackers)

I think hihostels.com should remove that comment about "dodgy backpackers". Some independent hostels are dodgy but many are as good or better than the HI hostels. The online reviews can sort out the dodgy hostels.

Well, exactly. They should remove it. Some HI hostels are good (although not many in Europe) and some are dodgy. The same can be said about independent hostels.

What really makes me mad is the obvious arrogance behind statements like that. I have worked for two HI hostels so I know what I´m talking about. They still think they are the Real McCoy while their number of guests declines year after year.
The manager of two HI hostels in Vienna said our success is only due to our huge marketing. Newsflash for the crackpot: in our first five years, our entire marketing effort was to spend € 10.000 for a website and print flyers. Budget for other marketing: nil, nada, zero. :mad:

Counter-argument:
I think hotel marketing is still in the stone age.

The European hostel boom happened in the same time as the rise of the Internet. Most hostel owners are quite aware of the power of the web - many hotels still aren´t.

What I meant by hostels being behind is that some hotels and many large travel sites are on top of the latest Internet marketing techniques. Hostels haven't really discovered them yet. I've seen the presentation materials from hostel conferences and I think that people are talking about "Web 2.0", "Travel 2.0", "RSS", search engine optimization, social media optimization, etc. in somewhat vague terms but I've only seen a couple of hostels that are doing it, and even then it still hasn't been taken to its potential.

With the exception of a handful of hostels, the only ones in the hostel industry using those techniques are the largest booking engines.

I mentioned some of the basic techniques in my ebook and on the site.

One small example of how hostels can gain a competitive advantage: Local search optimization - where hostels can get direct links to their Web sites at the top of the search results for free.

I can find at least one major city where a hostel chain has multiple hostels but no "local search" listings in Google. Many people searching for "[city] hostels" are not going to scroll down below those local listings.

That is just scratching the surface though :)

"Travel 2.0" and social media optimization is where things are heading. The potential is great. Even the smallest hostel can now consistently have thousands of visitors per day on their Web site if they know how to do it.

I guess the biggest hostel chain would possibly be Bavaria´s youth hostel federation, which owns 79 hostels.

In most countries, HI hostels are privately owned and in some countries they aren´t even defined as non-profit organizations.

Well I guess Hostelling International is a brand rather than a chain, but the individual associations in each country are chains. To make an accurate comparision you should count only those hostels owned by the organisation and not all the little associate hostels that pay a fee to use the HI logo.

I assume that HI owns around half their hostels, which means that no organisation has more than a couple of hundred of their own hostels.

Sometime in the next 10 years an independent company could be a bigger chain than any of HI's member associations.

I guess there is nothing stopping a hostel company from expanding to that extent.

It would take a small company a while to build up such a large portfolio, but a company like Accor could do it almost overnight if they really wanted to.

Accor have over 700 Ibis hotels, over 300 Etap hotels, almost 400 Formule 1 motels and I don't know how many Motel 6 motels they have but their website says that there are over 360 new Motel 6 motels in development.

I'm not sure what the relationship is between Base and Accor. I think it is a very small involvement, but they could invest more and ramp things up quickly once they are satisfied that the Base business model is working the way they want.