10 years
We also have received the contract for our hostel in San Francisco with a "required" acceptance date of August 2, 2013. If you are new to this discussion, please read the complete discussion located here.
Australia and New Zealand hostels have been very organized on this front and met to unanimously reject the contract. Full story here. It's important that North American hostel owners start discussing this as well, either on the forum or in person. To date, Hostelmanagment.com has received phone calls from a few North American hostel owners who are deeply concerned about the contract, however we have not seen any concerted discussion, either online or in person. It would seem North American hostel owners are perhaps not as organized as hostels in Australia and New Zealand. In light of this, perhaps we should alert hostels the old fashioned way. Pick up the phone and call hostels you are associated with and encourage them to do the same. Tell them about this discussion and the previous one.
On a personal note, the main 3 issues I have with the new contract are the same as BOA had.
- Requesting access to all online hostel inventory and rates including own website. As a small traditional hostel, we do not make all of our inventory available online or via online channels. In our view, we are selling community, not just a cheap bed. The worst thing you can do to destroy a community is to force an existing guest who we know and love to to check out, in order to check in a reservation for a guest we have never met. Single night stays decrease community and increase housekeeping burden. In addition, we always keep beds available for walk-in and last minute travelers since this type of backpacker is usually the sort of guests we like to have. In my opinion, this is a key difference between hostels and hotels and Hostelworld should not have the right to change the atmosphere in our hostels. Finally, we find the guests who book through our own website have more realistic expectations about our hostel because they have taken time to read about us. We think hostels should always have the right to create and define their community through their own marketing efforts, and only rely on Hostelworld and other booking channels (if they choose) as a secondary means of marketing.
- The change in definition of service fee in regards to GST. This has the potential to open a huge "can of worms" for our industry. By making the service fee separate from the deposit paid by travelers, Hostelworld will later have the ability to increase the cost they charge hostels for bookings *without* increasing the "deposit" amount backpackers have to pay to make a booking. They could also provide preferred ranking for hostels that are willing to pay more in service fee. In my experience, it's the lower quality hostels (and even hotels!) that would not mind paying more for each booking because they haven't put this money into improving their hostels. Personally, I think ranking should be purely based on the hostels rating because only this metric has the potential to reward the best hostels and improve our industry as a whole. [EDIT - Some members saw the writing on the wall about the possibility of Hostelworld making properties paying for ranking, apparently Hostelworld has already revealed their ELEVATE program. See the discussion here. ]
- Consent for use of propriety owned trademarks and brands. Hostelworld and Hostelbookers has already made it impossible for most hostels to do their own advertising and marketing. In San Francisco, if I wanted to do a Google AdWords campaign I would need to pay about $2 per click for that advertising. As an individual hostel this is an impossible cost to bear because there is no guarantee the click will turn into a booking. Hostelworld (and other booking sites) can be pretty much assured the click will generate a booking at at least one of the hostels in San Francisco. This new change in the contract would allow Hostelworld to buy Google AdWords for a hostels trademarked name! So if someone Googles the name of your hostel, Hostelworld may (in affect) steal that visitor from seeing your own hostel website.
As a small traditional hostel owner, I personally hope North American hostels will also reject this contract.
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