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

Gaining information from your customer base is taught in business as the best low cost way to gain valuable information that would normally cost a lot from consultants. Barack Obama went leaps and bounds as a result of engaging with the voters.

Lots of businesses list on Facebook and the like to gain feedback. Blogs have been great for this. For them to be effective there would have to be open forum discussion for all hostels that get to communicate with various contributors from HW.

Two years ago at the Dublin Conference hostels requested a separate booking engine for their website so they do not have to have the same low prices on their website. You would think HW would be motivated to provide this so that travellers would be more inclined to book with HW direct. I have my theory on why this has not occurred but I am keen to read what other people think?

So that hostels can't offer a lower price than the booking engine on their own website?

But why don't they have a Safe Travel option so people can register their travels and alerts can be sent to nominated phone numbers based on certain triggers?

Josh ought to set up a Safe Travel Twitter via this HostelManagement system.

EDIT: what do you mean by Safe Travel Twitter?

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?

There is a limit, but there is plenty of room for smaller booking engines to grow. It's about search engine rankings and traffic compared with the number of hostels listed on the booking engine -- only Hostelbookers has made progress. It's not as common to find the other booking engines in Google searches.

If the booking engine doesn't have enough traffic, each individual hostel on the booking engine won't get enough bookings to motivate them to allocate beds.

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 HostelManagement.com ;)

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.

OpenOffice is the base for StarOffice -- they sell a commercially supported version:
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/

I didn't know Oracle bought Sun. That is very interesting...

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.

Forum participation can be anonymous. Lurkers, just don't use your real name for your forum username and your boss won't know ;)

You can assume that someone already on your own website is much more likely to make a booking with you than someone on Hostelworld, where he can compare your offer easily with your competitors.
Hence, you would set a higher price on your own website (i.e. your booking engine) than on Hostelworld.

Once the travelers are on the hostel's website then it's an opportunity to sell beds at higher prices, but I think there are a few scenarios where a hostel could sell beds cheaper on the hostels site with good results (e.g., Direct-only specials to bring people to the hostel's own website).

One thing the booking engines possibly might not want:
If backpackers learned that they could save money by booking direct (on a large scale) then there might be fewer bookings for the booking engines.

Another possibility: booking engines don't want individual hostels undercutting the booking engine prices in Google AdWords because then the booking engines would be bidding against advertisers with better offers.

See the screenshot below from a search for sydney hostels. The booking engines are highlighted in red with offers of $13, $14, and 12€. An individual hostel is advertising for $26 per night. If the hostel were advertising at $12 per night special when booked direct (with a selection of beds, not all beds - just like the booking engines), it might be a more attractive ad than the booking engines' ad and might affect clicks, positions, and prices of the ads.

When you're spending thousands of dollars per day on Google AdWords, it's better if people aren't bidding against you with more attractive ads :)

I don't know -- just speculating :)

Maybe Hostelbookers has made some progress with their web marketing (I´m sure you can judge that better than me), but it does not at all translate into more bookings. They deliver less than a year ago.

I think it's partially the traffic and rankings. Once the visitor lands on the booking engine's website, the bookings to individual hostels is diluted by the number of properties listed as well as other factors. (design, position on the page, conversion rates, etc.)

Hostelworld lists 71 Berlin hostels on their default view. They also have ~115 hotel and other accommodation, but not on the main Berlin page.

Hostelbookers has 32 hostels in Berlin and about 33 hotels on the same page, further diluting the bookings that go to the hostels. If Hostelbookers removed the hotels from their default view it might concentrate their amount of traffic into better bookings for the hostels.

I think booking engines are more concerned with their own total income than for income and bookings to any individual hostel. It seems like Hostelbookers is doing well though. (Maybe that would be a good thread topic: Are people's Hostelbookers bookings generally increasing or decreasing?)

It's not just search engines and traffic, but that is one factor that is hurting some of the smaller booking engines. I think that if they don't have the search engine traffic they won't be able to send bookings no matter what they do.

They should have used the marketing money to reduce the "deposit" to 5% and offer the hostels (and their affiliates) to get the entire deposit back.
The reduced commission would motivate hostels to allocate more beds to them. The free use of the booking engine would motivate the hostels to skip HW´s booking engine for Hostelbookers.
Those hostel booking engines (and the affiliates) are what made HW so huge, because eventually everybody will book a bed in a hostel which uses HW´s booking engine - then HW has got a new email address of a hostel user and can start to feed the person with newsletters and propaganda. The next time this person travels, he won´t google for hostels but go straight to Hostelworld.com.

It is so obvious... just not if you´re a profit-maximizing short-term-thinker.

The free on-site booking engine (in trade for allocations) is a great idea that would still be relatively easy to do. The smaller booking engines should build that for hostels' websites.

Features:

• 100% free for hostels (in exchange for non-exclusive bed allocations)
• full integration with Google Analytics and possibly other stats programs, including full ecommerce tracking so that hostels could track the exact income from each booking source down to individual keywords and referring URLs. Hostels will want it once they see it in action :)
• trendy and intuitive Web 2.0 interface designed by Mac-using Ruby on Rails-type coders :)

Anyway back to the booking engine, basically it will have a pretty big selection of payment gateways so you can choose who your most comfortable with, there will be a small monthly cost maybe around $30 - $40, but after that everything will be unlimited, we will take no booking fees, there will be no limitations, it will track where your visitors are coming from affiliate id's etc.

It's not going to be ready for a little while, but I'll make sure everyone on here gets to test and play around when it’s ready to roll!

Matt

It might be hard to sell this to a lot of hostels as a lot of them already have their own booking portal thru HW. Although this isn't truly on site, as they go to a page which may have your hostel branding, but is hosted by HW. The advantage of this is that the payment goes through HW secure servers, which may engender more confidence in the customer. I think most hostels would get back the majority of this money if the booking is made thru their site, less CC fee percentage (I assume you'd have to pass on whatever CC fees were incurred to the hostel). Although $30-$40 a month might not be a lot, it's another cost you have to convince a hostel to take on. Good luck with it anyway - the more options there are out there the better.

As far as why you can't charge lower on your hostel booking page compared to the main HW site, I can only assume it's so we don't undercut HW - I certainly would if I could. It makes sense to drive as many bookings as possible through your own website, and having the lowest price possible on your own website would be the best way to do this.