11 years
Hi Enrico:
We have an apartment in Riga Latvia with 22 beds www.funkyhostel.com . My sister runs it and looks after the day to day things. It took me a lot of trials to settle on software to use. Big considerations with small hostels is that, yes as you allude to, software is important for a small hostel for different reasons than it is important to a large hostel. A small hostel can not afford to hold back any availability and needs as many longer average bookings as possible and as many direct bookings as possible. So get started on a good website ASAP.
A small hostel with only about 5 rooms has the challenge to have a variety of room types offered for sale on agent sites like HostelWorld etc. If all 5 rooms are different room types then you risk losing bookings by not having a matrix of different rooms for one room type to accommodate bookings that overlap. Then if you do have all the rooms of one type then you risk missing out on bookings that could have booked a room type you could create for that guest.
So what we have is a solution that enables the doubling of room types sold on the agent sites like Hostelworld. So there are 5 virtual rooms and 5 physical rooms in the software but the guest sees them all as real bookable rooms. This way you capture the booking at your price that the guest wants to book. Virtual rooms get closed off when the physical related room is booked. I think a couple other software providers are addressing this same capability so we may not be the only provider for this.
For the integrated booking engine that goes in to your website it enables one physical room to be sold as many types. So you could have a room with a Double Bed and two Single Beds in it being concurrently offered on your website as a Three Bed Dorm, Single Private, Twin Private, Double Bed Private. Triple Private, or Four Bed Private. So in effect not just doubling your online offer but increasing it 600% for this one room type. The typical result is over 100% improvement in direct online bookings for users of the software that places the hostel well on the path to gaining over 100% improvement in profit. User stories here http://www.hosteloffice.com/#users
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