Hostelworld "categories"

thanks for the explanation. i just heard back from hostelworld and they confirmed these definitions. Apparently they are still working on the definitions and i suggested 'laid-back' hostel for the list.

if we are going to be stuck with this (I am assuming you can choose not to check anything) then perhaps people should send suggestions to their 'buddies'.

Also hostelworld is having a bunch of regional meetings this year..the one for the western USA is in March...i think this is a good place to express your concerns about being pigeon holed.

I think I understand what HW is trying to do here but they seem to be going about it backwards - giving reviewers the ability to 'tag' a hostel as one or two of the categories available would a) enable hostels to avoid having to pidgeonhole themselves and b) means taht you could have split tags. ie. 40% of guests tagged this hostel as a party hostel, 30% as beach hostel and 10% as gay friendly. The level of these tags could obviously change over time and would therefore reflect what guests view the hostel as rather than how the hostel would like to be represented - with the former being both more important and accurate.

I think I understand what HW is trying to do here but they seem to be going about it backwards - giving reviewers the ability to 'tag' a hostel as one or two of the categories available would a) enable hostels to avoid having to pidgeonhole themselves and b) means taht you could have split tags. ie. 40% of guests tagged this hostel as a party hostel, 30% as beach hostel and 10% as gay friendly. The level of these tags could obviously change over time and would therefore reflect what guests view the hostel as rather than how the hostel would like to be represented - with the former being both more important and accurate.

I suppose "classified" hostels could lead to targeted advertising and product offers for Hostelworld. Still very unclear how a "classified hostel" has any real benefit to a hostel.

I think I understand what HW is trying to do here but they seem to be going about it backwards

Gordo is exactly right here - HW´s huge edge has always been their user-generated content. I think most users don´t give a crap about how the hostels describe themselves and know that even pictures can lie.

HW is trying to respond to the trend of diversivication. In highly competetive markets with lots of hostels, many of them stopped to try to please everybody, but specialize on a niche and tell everybody else to stay away. In order to stay user-friendly, users have to be able to identify the best choice for them in the shortest possible time. The average rating clearly has limits here. Reading through the reviews of dozens of hostels is too much fuss for most users, it takes too long.

I would go one step further than Gordo though - Josh had pointed out this idea previously: instead of tagging the hostels, I´d prefer a sulution where users tag themselves. For example, an Aussie bloke looking for party places is not interested in the opinions of Chinese girls who came to Europe to do sight-seeing [I´m only using silly stereotypes to make the point clear. Dear Chinese girls: you rock!]. So, there should be a way to filter. In order to be able to do this, reviews and ratings should stay on the site longer than six months, so the samples of filtered ratings don´t get too small.
Booking.com does exactly that: you can sort by ratings of all users, or, for example, only by ratings from couples.

There are also other ways the search options could be improved: it would surely help some users a lot if the hostels could be sorted by e.g. cleanliness ratings or fun ratings, not just by the overall rating.

There are still only six categories to rate - Hostelbookers has eight, in addition to HW´s categories, there is "facilities" and "value", those two make a lot of sense.

I´m really wondering why HW hasn´t outsourced their brainstorming to this forum yet! :D