Hostelbookers.com is reporting a large increase in bookings in 2008.
Is anyone seeing a similar large increase in bookings at their hostels?
I wonder if this is partly due to the specific keywords that they and their affiliates rank for in Google. Search engines are one of the factors that make or break the booking engines.
16 years
Interesting.
Given they list just a single property in Pai -- a destination which is noted on your write-up as "having a notable increase in bookings" (and which, as per this thread, most certainly is not a hostel!) -- I guess the 83% figure if from a very low base.
Still, good luck to them.
16 years
I'm guessing most of the increase is from the big cities.
My take on it is that they are #3 in Google for Amsterdam hostels and probably ranking well for most or all of the other cities in their list. Hostelbookers has the most advanced search engine optimization campaign of any booking engine -- that's why they are right on WRI's heels in Google, and the other engines are significantly behind.
Hostelbookers also offer larger affiliate commissions than WRI which is why some affiliates might tend to prefer sending bookings to Hostelbookers.
I used the words 10,000 properties instead of 10,000 hostels because I think all the hostel booking engines tend to call any budget accommodation a "hostel". :)
16 years
This is an aside, but prob relevant to the discussion.
Google has updated the Trends package so it now shows some pretty accurate numbers
Search of "hostel bookers" vs "hostel world"
http://trends.google.com/trends?q=hostel+bookers%2C+hostel+world&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Much more interesting: Hostel world traffic Vs Hostelbookers traffic
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=hostelworld.com%2C+hostelbookers.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
The latter shows the diff in traffic remaining pretty static (and bear in mind it doesn't include bookhostels.com). Interesting they both took a dip just before Xmas last year as I'd expected that to be a busy time for them. More interesting though, if Hostelbookers are really seeing the surge in bookings they're claiming, then this is coming out of better leverage of existing custom rather than an 83% surge in traffic.
You need to be signed into GoogleTron to see the numbers on the above graphs. Given both sites use Google analytics, I'd expect the numbers to be pretty good.
16 years
Very interesting feature.
WRI gets a lot of traffic.
Interesting to compare the traffic on the different booking engines.
I wonder how closely Alexa Rank will match.
Interesting that Google Trends doesn't seem to want to display Google.com or YouTube.com data.
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