Americans... wassup?

Something weird unfolds.

Our number of bookings through Hostelworld in October 2008, compared with October 2007, is 4% down in Vienna and 16% down in Munich. That has never happened before. Since 8 years, Hostelworld sales went in only one direction: up.

Indeed. However, it is a principle of capitalism that it is impossible to have infinite expansion in a definite environment. Should we say that HW is in a crisis, a bubble just waiting to be burst? :rolleyes:

I stated in enough previous threads that why HW's monopoly on the market is not good for us. I won't repeat myself.

Now, Hostelworld also shows the number of bookings city-wide compared to the previous month.
Munich: -19%
Vienna: -17%
Berlin: -12%
So: the rest of the hostels in town are even worse off. You may say that less bookings in October isn´t unusual, because season is over. However, it is unusual. This is October 2007 compared with September 2007:
Munich: +20%
Vienna +3%
Berlin +2%

Budapest is -26% on last month. Unfortunately can't provide you statistics about previous year, but we have -35% less bookings up to date comparing to previous month. At least our walk ins can compensate it.

I had a closer look to find out what´s going on and looked at the "customer analysis" - that shows where the people who made bookings are from.
Compared to October 2007, the number of Americans is 39% down in Munich and 22% down in Vienna. There are also less Britons and Canadians, though not that much.

Then I checked if I missed something and compared the months before to the same in 2007 - nothing unusual.

So: this may either be a huge and very rare outlier or something very serious is going on. Until September, 20% of our guests were Americans. They won´t be easily replaced.

Check your recent guest statistics - is it the same everywhere?

Our major nationalities are (IMHO just like mostly elsewhere): Aussies, Americans and Brits.

September '07 stats:
AUS: 32%
USA: 14%
UK: 13%
Overall: 60%

October '07 stats:
AUS: 30%
USA: 30%
UK: 8%
Overall: 68%

BUT:

September '08 stats:
AUS: 18%
USA: 11%
UK: 10%
Overall: 39%

October '08 stats:
AUS: 21%
USA: 16%
UK: 4,5%
Overall: 41,5%

So what we have here comparing to last year? 30% less Aussies due the weak AUD, 50% less Americans due the financial crisis and 20% less Brits due the bad economy in the UK. Overall 30% less of the major nationalities.

About Americans, most of them travels on a debt instead of savings (this is a typical American thing, being in debt for your whole life), either from a bank (that's hard nowadays) or from daddy's credit (I don't think many of them can afford such luxury now).

I wonder how many 4-5 star hotels will be gone bust because of this crisis.

Interesting, cheers.

No problems! ;) I hope other hostels are willing to share their stats! :)

Well, my intention was not to express concern about Hostelworld. It´s just that I referred to the statistics in the HW inbox because those are pretty much the only ones I have. We do have own statistics about the nationalities of our guests, but the nightshift makes them and I guess they aren´t too accurate. That´s that.

My assumtion is: if something unusual happens in HW´s statistics, something unusual happens - because they do in fact have a de-facto-monopoly.

Well, I did not want to express only concerned about HW, but rather about a de-facto monopoly affecting on the market. As I mentioned before, if HW messes up something (or just can't react on any market changes), that affects a lot to hostels. None of us can afford such luxury, innit?

Maybe we can split the topic and have some separate ones like:

- How does HW's monopoly affects on the evolution and market expansion of hostels?
- How does this financial crisis effects the budget tourism?

Interesting - the number of Aussies is still constant here. I guess a big number of Aussies care more about the GBP-EUR exchange rate than the AUD-EUR rate, because so many of them live in London.

That wouldn't explain why Aussies are less in our hostel. :confused:
You ain't here yet! :D

Strange, isn´t it? It´s the same in South America. I remember when I bought a coach ticket in Brazil on my credit card, they have asked me if I want them to charge it now or in six months. WTF?

I guess those days are over and unfortunately it can badly affect Americans backpacking Europe.

Let´s hope there´ll be many of them! :)
I just had a funny chat with another hostel manager - he said the best way to open a hostel in New York now is to buy a bank. Banks are really cheap now and they are usually located in prime locations. Buy a bank, ask Hank Paulson for some bailout money, then kick out the furniture and replace it with bunks. :D

I guess such hostel would have 100% security then! :D

I wonder if the recent addition of AdSense on Hostelworld could be to try to make up for a decreasing number of Americans booking hostels... (?)

Google displays ads based on content on the page, and possibly from the visitor's personal data that Google collects.

A hostel booking makes a booking engine 10% (sometimes plus booking fee), which is significant. A click on AdSense takes the user away from a site and usually just makes cents, though it depends on the keywords. Total AdSense income on a high traffic site with the right keywords can be a lot though so who knows. The last I heard, the highest AdSense publisher in N. America was making $500,000 per month out of his living room. Could be a significant amount of extra income. I don't know...