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Hostel Booking Engine APIs (Hostelworld, Hostelbookers, Hostelsclub, etc.)

Hostel Trends and News

Josh started this discussion 15 years 6 months ago

Online hostel bookings have been around for about 10 years already, but it's still difficult to get hostel bookings from the Internet into the front desk software. Most hostels still have to login to multiple booking engines, print out the latest bookings and then manually enter them into the computer. There have been some exceptions to this manual data entry method like HostelOffice and Charts.

Despite the advances of software like HostelOffice and Charts, I've heard that at the end of May Hostelworld is going to shut down the ability of some front desk software to automatically allocate beds and download bookings.

If I understand correctly, that means that Backpack Online (Hostelworld's own software) would be the only PMS to automatically sychronize hostel availability and bookings with Hostelworld. Everyone else would need to go back to manually downloading all their reservations and manually changing allocations daily.

There is some talk of Hostelworld making an API (Application Programming Interface) that would allow other software to synchronize with Hostelworld, but they have not confirmed that an API is being developed or will be released before the end of May. Even if Hostelworld does make an API, between the time that Hostelworld shuts down the ability of front desk software to synchronize and the time they make an official API, the hostels that depend on this feature will have a difficult time.

Even if you aren't directly affected by this issue, it seems like this move will negatively affect many hostels. It essentially makes it so Hostelworld's own Backpack Online software is the only front desk software that will be able to synchronize with Hostelworld.com.

What do you think about this? And, do you think that all the booking engines should have a standard API (Application Programming Interface) that all front desk software could synchronize with?

Comments

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Scotch Argus

15 years

Again software like we provide www.hosteloffice.com prevents hostels from having to wait years to have a booking engine on their website that best represents what the hostel offers.

I could go on with examples.But the point I am making here is that the largest booking agents are not responsive enough. It seems to me that they are most responsive when they have competition or see a way to dominate the market.

Competition for these agents seems to be defined as 'something they perceive to be as a threat to their income'. So there are bound to be areas that in reality do not threaten income but effort is made to dominate that area anyway.

Business being motivated by profit alone I hope is not sustainable. Other ways of looking at a business by examining Total Throughput, Sub Optimisation, Win Win, Internal and external customers, Health & Safety etc would be parts of an more humane online system.

I would suggest the reason why better services are not provided is simply because the two largest agents are focussed on the money. I have written in an email to HW that with the number one position comes responsibility and no longer can they simply just pursue profit. So there should be no excuse of not being aware of the idea.

As a hostel owner you want to make money but you also want happy guests and happy staff. The best way to achieve this is through being genuine. The current top agents unfortunately focus the hostels on the money only. These top agents don't want to be the forum for the best You Tube video or the best Podcast on a city because they want to create these videos and podcasts themselves and dominate the market. Just look at how Colm from HW achieved his Webby Award.

Sure there are many hostel owners/managers that don't care. But when these top agents come across people that do care and can offer value to to their business they ought to engage in conversation.

Tell me I am wrong?

Surely you're promoting a product which as it has a booking engine, is in direct competition to HW? I would personally expect them to try and protect their market. That's how the system works - big companies are large and unresponsive, and try and protect their market. Small companies are more nimble, and have to try and eat into the market of the market leaders. Personally I'd imagine that most people reading this are motivated by profit. Hopefully this motivation can be combined with working in an industry we enjoy and meeting people who make our job worthwhile.

To me HW are a company that make money out of getting a percentage of the bednight fee when people stay in our hostel. I don't really expect them to act altruistically, but I would hope that our interests converge, in that the more bookings we get the more money they make, so it's in their interests to try and keep the bookings coming in.

Comparisons are always made between the hotel and hostel industry, but the hostel industry is tiny compared to hotels - maybe there is a limit to how many booking engines that can be supported by the limited numbers of hostels that exist in the world?

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HostelOffice

15 years

Supporting the profit motive is always a winner as it is what is taught about capitalism. Where it goes wrong is when the market loses the ability to correct itself so that value remains proportionate to cost.
A hostel has its own owners that want to achieve an objective that is mostly tied to profit. But when people - owners and guests start to think that there is more value they would like to gain from transactions as they become aware of hidden costs and consequences of their transaction then they look to engage with value adding.
Just because you can be smart and come up with the perfect profit making system it does not mean that you have to do it. I have held back many times to give competition a chance to gain a foot hold instead of dominating.
I understand that HW etc have new owners involved with the business purely for the profit motive. But there are people in HW that surely want to keep the fun in their work life and stay connected to the mind of the traveller and offer what is valuable to the traveller more than just a booking system.

The fact that many people registered on this system hide their real identity says a lot. Many hostel owners and managers I meet are scared of these top two agents.

Is this the sort of market we expected the backpacker business to be or wanted it to become? Mr Nolan himself the initiator of HW has fond memories of meeting backpackers at the bus station.

I would have thought that it should be everyones responsibility to try to bring the best out of businesses rather than just people.
Saying a business is motivated by money does not give them an excuse to squander the opportunity that the market position they occupy presents them with.

So yes we can empathise with them but we don't have to be scared of them and not work to influence how they communicate with us or on behalf of us.

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Traveldudes

15 years

Talking about money and capitalism... Hostels still presents the low budget traveling branch, right? That would mean the guests are mainly backpackers and independent travelers, right? For me that doesn't fit together! Sorry! Sure, you have to make a living and earn your money, but it shouldn't be just for the profit. Otherwise hostel owners would run All Inclusive Resorts. The same is with backpacker online portals. If they only want the big dollars, they should start selling package all inclusive holidays.

I just wonder why there is still a commission system in the internet for hostels! Travel Agencies, with completely higher running costs than internet portals, don't get any commission from airlines for years anymore. That change was hard for them, but they changed their system and it works fine now.

Why is it possible to have a system with NO commission? Because this is the World Wide Web & sites like Wikipedia, Mozilla, Couchsurfing, Drupal, OpenOffice and other communities offer their valuable services or knowledge for the benefit of others FOR FREE. And please don't come me with stuff like "That's how the system works - big companies are large and unresponsive, and try and protect their market. Small companies are more nimble, and have to try and eat into the market of the market leaders."
The above mentioned companies are big fishes out there and they are the best example how it could work.
I'm running Traveldudes.org in the same sense. By Travelers and For Travelers.

It can work without commissions and it should in the low budget travel branch! That is my own opinion to this topic.
I can just ask you (the hostel owners) again, if my other entry is what you need.

Many greetings

Melvin

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Scotch Argus

15 years

I don't want to run an all inclusive resort - I think there is ample opporunity to make a profit out of running a hostel, and it presents me with the lifestyle I like. I've had the opportunity to manage large city hostels in the past but passed it by as I'd rather run a small hostel where I deal with the customers.

I'd imagine that the commission pays for all the people employed by companies like HW and HB. If you can get someone to do all those tasks for free I'd say you have a good future. Obviously they make money too. I'm not ashamed to ask to be paid for the work I do.

Wikipedia, Mozilla, Couchsurfing, Drupal are not for profit companies, so can hardly be compared to the tourist and accommodation business. As for openoffice, I'm not sure what their model is, but I'd guess it might be to do with building up a critical mass to compete with MS. Where they'll go now Oracle has taken them over will be interesting to see.

I think if you're providing a portal to compete with the professional ones it'll have to be very good - there are plenty of unprofessional ones out there and I doubt they have a lot of hits.

Good luck with it.

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santa klaus

15 years

Supporting the profit motive is always a winner as it is what is taught about capitalism. Where it goes wrong is when the market loses the ability to correct itself so that value remains proportionate to cost.

Correct. But is this really the case?

You can´t blame HW for the stupidity of their competitors. HW started in 1999 and the first time they were confronted with any competition at all was in 2004 when Hostelbookers started.

What they offered had a small advantage for the customer (no booking fee), but no advantage whatsoever for the hostels - they had to handle one allocation more for a booking site which took the exact same amount of commission - 10%. It meant extra work for the hostels, that´s why many didn´t even bother to allocate beds to HB. If there´s less to chose from, there´s little reason for travelers to use HB.
This is the reason HB never really took off. If they would have set the commission at 5%, they either would have killed HW in a very short time, or HW would have lowered the commission as well, so we would have a perfectly competetive market now.

It was the same with Gomio. It provided an advantage for the hostels (no commission at all), but a huge disadvantage for the travelers: a much bigger booking fee than what they had to pay at HW. Result: the beds reserved through Gomio were the most expensive ones. Perfect recipe for failure.

You can come up with lots of smart theories why markets sometimes fail. IMHO, in many cases they fail because there is only one intelligent person on the market.

HW provided a very intelligent solution for the hostels AND travellers very early. I worked the reception 1999-2002 and remember very well the pre-HW era. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to book ahead and I often had to deal with 50 emails in one 8-hour shift - in addition to making 200 actual guests happy. It was a total mess and often a third of the reserved beds were no-shows. We were very satisfied when we started to process all our bookings through Hostelworld. The commission was cheaper than the extra staff we would have had to hire for anwereing the phone and emails and the no-show-problem was solved. The guests were happy, too, because they could make a booking with instant confirmation - and a SECURE booking at that, not a phone reservation where they had to show up before 6pm or have no booking any more.

HW has a quasi-monopoly now because in ten years there was not one competitor who offered a better product for hostels AND travellers. Can you blame HW for this?

The fact that many people registered on this system hide their real identity says a lot. Many hostel owners and managers I meet are scared of these top two agents.

Is this the sort of market we expected the backpacker business to be or wanted it to become?

The HW scare is pure paranoia. OK, they are important, but such things have never been the reason I keep my mouth shut. Hey, they didn´t kill me so far, so they can´t be that evil? :D

There are many lurkers here because nobody wants to share his "business secrets" (LOL!) with his competitors. Hostel staff only lurk because they are scared of their boss.

Welcome to "backpacker business"...

So yes we can empathise with them but we don't have to be scared of them and not work to influence how they communicate with us or on behalf of us.

To be fair, you have to acknowledge that HW has come a long way in a very short time. It was created only ten years ago to save the owner of the Avalon House Hostel in Dublin a lot of hassle with all those emails and now-shows. Now, all of a sudden, it´s the big brother of an entire industry. I travelled through Croatia and Bosnia last week and more than once I saw HW´s logo painted all over a hostel facade. Their logo is now the unofficial international pictogram for "hostel" - imagine that.

If you spend a great deal of time in an office tower, being busy with building up a multimillion-Euro-business it´s no surprise it takes some time until you realize that sort of thing. So - please be a little lenient toward them, despite all the profit they make (do you really care so much about money?). I positively know they are just finding this out.

Talking about money and capitalism... Hostels still presents the low budget traveling branch, right? That would mean the guests are mainly backpackers and independent travelers, right? For me that doesn't fit together!

Newsflash: most hostel owners are a mixture of your typical capitalist vultures and ordinary slum landlords. Not the slightest hint of empathy for their guests or their employees in their behaviour!

I am very lucky to work for a hostel chain with two owners who seem to realize that it serves their long-term interests much better if they create a working environment in which everybody actually likes to do his job.

Or maybe it doesn´t. We have more staff than other hostels and pay them better. This alone adds at least € 2 to every bed night. What do you think: how many travelers are willing to pay € 2 more, just so I have a nice salary?

Do they care how much the Chinese child earns who made their iPod?

Why is it possible to have a system with NO commission? Because this is the World Wide Web & sites like Wikipedia, Mozilla, Couchsurfing, Drupal, OpenOffice and other communities offer their valuable services or knowledge for the benefit of others FOR FREE.

...

The above mentioned companies are big fishes out there and they are the best example how it could work.

Ha! Right! I´m sure you´ll be thrilled by this article!

I was never totally convinced that communism is such a bad idea. They just tried it 100 years too early. I was right all along. As always! ;)

Wikipedia, Mozilla, Couchsurfing, Drupal are not for profit companies, so can hardly be compared to the tourist and accommodation business.

Why not?

By the way: are you sure we´ll survive Couchsurfing? Maybe there won´t be so many for-profit-companies left in the long run if the Dot-Communist guy is right. ;)

I think if you're providing a portal to compete with the professional ones it'll have to be very good - there are plenty of unprofessional ones out there and I doubt they have a lot of hits.

Better than the existing ones does not mean "very good". It´s not that they are not "professional" enough - they are too "professional" in the way that they only try to copy HW. Very obviously, the guys (I doubt there are a lot of girls) behind them are only greedy, but not very clever.

I don´t know if it´s not yet too late to challenge HW, but five years ago a combination of HB á la 5%-commission and TFT travel would have been a very serious problem for HW.

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Scotch Argus

15 years

Why not?

By the way: are you sure we´ll survive Couchsurfing? Maybe there won´t be so many for-profit-companies left in the long run if the Dot-Communist guy is right. ;)

Because if you're setting up a commission free booking portal then the hostels are potentially saving a lot of money. Therefore it could be seen by some of these as a way of cutting costs and making more money. So if you're asking programmers to work free to set this up they are just subsidising hostels. There's not much ideology in that. The other sites mentioned get people working for free because they feel ideologically driven to do so. Or in the case of openoffice are also bankrolled by large companies.

I feel hostels are as likely to be sent broke by couchsurfing as bus and train companies are to be sent broke by hitch hiking and online organised lift sharing. The market of people who are happy to share a strangers house or car will always be a niche.

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santa klaus

15 years

Don´t take my heresy seriously. I´m just the jester of the hostel scene. Well, actually, my motto is "make jokes when you are serious but be serious when you are joking". Or maybe I´t just really time I leave office now. :)

So if you're asking programmers to work free to set this up they are just subsidising hostels. There's not much ideology in that. The other sites mentioned get people working for free because they feel ideologically driven to do so.

Programmers are working free for Drupal and Wikipedia, so why not for hostels? There are a lot of ideologically driven people in our business, after all.

I´m quite sure we will have an open-source PMS eventually.

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HostelOffice

15 years

The old saying in business is 'Tell Me How You Will Measure My Performance and then I will Tell You How I Will Perform'.

Google sell rankings and the top agents use the income from hostels to pay Google to get top search rankings. So Google is contributing to the way top agents are performing. As most people use Google it is the people that give Google the power.

Try using something like Yahoo and you will see mostly local hostel results at the top. So maybe search engines like Yahoo ought to market themselves as 'The Backpackers Travel Partner'.

In the mean time we have agents occupying the best Google positions mostly via payments to Google. This helps the hostels that don't care about their website and drives the price per bed down due to the way the agents list value for money.

So the point is that using the position you have occupied should not be having the objective to kill competition. keep your position and make money but don't lose sight of ethical business practices.

Smaller businesses provide value to many other small businesses that the large companies have less interest in. In my experience there has to be businesses like my www.hosteloffice.com as the top agents are not responsive enough.

I mean come on -They don't even have a forum or blog for hostels to give them feedback. They don't even understand that Hostels are their internal customer. One of these top agents told me I was trying to spin my words when I mentioned Internal Customer.

The traveller is the external customer and the top agents have to engage with their customer base that includes internal customers. If they truly want to be the best representative of the industry they are in and in balance with the online position they occupy then they have to allow a mechanism for discussion.

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santa klaus

15 years

I guess there is hardly anyone who measures HW by anything else than the number of bed nights they sell. They perform pretty damn well there.

This is not "us vs them". It´s NOT the case that we, the hostels are the ethical small business and they are the evil corporation. Example: until two years ago, hostel owners could "deactivate" negative reviews on HW so nobody could see them. They asked hostel owners if they want this policy changed, so all reviews, good and bad, could be seen. 80% of the hostels voted "no". 80% of hostel owners are crooks who don´t care about their customer´s feedback.
Fortunately, HW ignored the overwhelming majority of their "internal customers" and did the right thing.

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HostelOffice

15 years

Yeah mate you are spouting the obvious again. First it was capitalism and now you are trying to reduce this discussion to cliches and broad sweeping comments like 'It is Not Us Versus Them'.

There are specifics that can be discussed here like the value of an open forum, You Tube or Podcast competitions not created by the top agents. A true supporter of these agents does not kill critical conversation but engages in it because when these folk read it they will be more informed and able to make better decisions.

If I did not want them to be stronger then I would not write things they can do to become stronger. But I am not going ignore what they do that kills value to the industry. They do not own the industry no matter that they were the first. They have to be stronger in a manner that focuses more on people and their businesses rather than the easiest way to make profit.

This is not "us vs them". It´s NOT the case that we, the hostels are the ethical small business and they are the evil corporation. Example: until two years ago, hostel owners could "deactivate" negative reviews on HW so nobody could see them. They asked hostel owners if they want this policy changed, so all reviews, good and bad, could be seen. 80% of the hostels voted "no". 80% of hostel owners are crooks who don´t care about their customer´s feedback.
Fortunately, HW ignored the overwhelming majority of their "internal customers" and did the right thing.

Santa Klaus You are not telling the full truth. Hostel Owners voted against it because there was not going to be the possibility for Hostel Owners to reply to comments. It was going to be all one way information.

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