Backpack Online versus Backpack for Windows !

Privacy? What privacy, sharing is the point and I think you are too old in this business to see easily what a competitor has to sell on the market, prices, allocation and turnover.:)

Yes, sharing is the point... but it only works if both sides share and both benefit from the share. You also benefit from this forum sharing my two pennies but you rather ask me on the phone if you need a private advice, right? ;)

Knowledge is power and I'm not giving this power for nothing. I guess it's the same for anyone else. Not that my small hostel would make a change for them but we are talking about principles. If I find BPO that much beneficial and more useful than the current version, I might considering switching to.

I agree with aboriginal. Too much public info, and on top of that, I think it's not a great system. Also, let's not forget that this is an international forum, and a lot of us operate in areas where constant internet access, or even constant electricity is a problem.

Backpack for Windows syncs with WRI's servers to download the bookings and upload availability. I'm not saying that Hostelworld are doing it, but I think it would be easy for them to view all of a hostel's customers' data even with the desktop version...

Backpack for Windows syncs with WRI's servers to download the bookings and upload availability. I'm not saying that Hostelworld are doing it, but I think it would be easy for them to view all of a hostel's customers' data even with the desktop version...

Of course they can see...thats why they offer this option inside of BPO in allocation tab... To have the benefit of this option(I mean to be able to add another bookings providers inside of BPO) you will need 1 year to work with them, at list 100 beds and a minimum of 25% of your beds to allocate to them, and you can sell your beds to n providers...
The real problem is that they know how many beds you have anyway (all) in Backpack(both versions) and depending on that and your online availability you will get more bookings or not.
They random the way how the hostels appear on HW website first time when a user search for hostels in a specific city. First time when you click on a city ''x'' hostel will appear on first listing;if you refresh the page another hostel will appear, so they random that, but what I think is that they random in a different way, depends on your allocation dedicated compared with your total amount of beds. So they can see that ''x'' hostel, even if they have just 20 beds all together, have allocated 80% for them and they are happy with that.:)

SHARING IS THE POINT !