As promised at the HW conference, HW is making 500,000€ in funding available in an attempt to raise awareness of the hostel concept and consequently attract new customers to hostels. This new marketing program is called “Think Hostels.”
The idea is that hostels would create events in their cities and HW would provide funding for those events.
This is the email from HW that many of you may have already received:
Hi there,
Following on from the announcement made at our 2014 Hostelworld Conference I am delighted to inform you that the Hostelworld “Think Hostels” marketing programme is now live.
This initiative will be funded by Hostelworld to the value of €500,000 and is targeted specifically to develop the hostel sector. This joint initiative aims to grow awareness of the great hostel product that is on offer, promote the social experience that is unique to Hostels and, as a result, develop and grow customer numbers for the industry sector as a whole.
What will we achieve?
- Promote awareness of the Hostel industry
- Promote destination awareness where great hostel product is available
- Grow our mutual hostel customer base and revenues
What ideas are you looking for?
Anything! We love to hear your ideas, whether it is coming together to organise a cool event in a city or adding value to an existing event in that city, you know your customers and what they want, let us partner with you to get your dream event closer to reality. We will provide sponsorship and the marketing reach to ensure the event’s success.
Think Hostels
Make it fun
Make it memorable
Make it hostels
To submit your ideas click here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Thinkhostels
Submitted ideas will be reviewed monthly and those that can help us all to achieve our aim of growing customer awareness of hostels will be approved and implemented. Make sure you give us as much notice as possible so we can ensure the right events receive funding. In other words get those ideas in early!
Feel free to contact your account manager to talk through your ideas and to help point you in the right direction. Likewise if you have any other questions regarding this joint marketing initiative please do contact us.
I wondered if large events in large cities would be more appealing to HW than smaller activities in non-key destinations, so I asked my HW Buddy for more information about what kind of events or activities they had in mind. Here is her response:
Hi Brian,
Thank you for your e-mail.
Think Hostels is a completely new progaramme, so anything can happen. We do not know ourselves where this will go. We don’t know how high the bar will be raised and which ideas will be the winning ones, so any idea is welcome and any idea can win.
In theory, it is probably easier to attract bigger response in an already established destination, but it will all depend on the idea offered. It should be something promoting the whole industry: hostels, hostelling, hostelworld, off the beaten track destination, anything. There is no limit to the size of the hostel or city. Every hostel is eligible no matter how big or small.
So please, send your ideas through!
Hostels can submit their ideas to the property team through this form: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Thinkhostels (the link was sent in the email and is also available in the hostels Inbox).
I hope this helps.
So according to my Buddy, I could get money, and so could YOU.
This is pretty cool. It’s an active step to do exactly what we have asked them for: attract NEW travelers to hostels. Plus, they’re asking us to create the events that we would want and make them happen, so we have some level of involvement to ensure that our events promote hostels and not just HW.
If you had the funding, what kind of events could you put together to promote your own hostel and hostelling in general? HW is offering that funding. Bravo.
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