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Bose started this discussion 8 years 10 months ago

Hey, just poking my head up to say Hi!

I recently fell into being the lead person at a hostel.

We had a sweet Fall season. It was fun turning the simple things around -- keeping our 10K sq ft of space clean, being congenial and connecting with people. So, we went from having scathingly negative reviews (which we earned!) before I got here, to having heartfelt, happy good-byes at the end of weekends with a full house.

When things got eerily quiet in December, I started pouring my time into figuring out how hostels work. Being a data-driven IT guy for a few decades, I've now got a spreadsheet with bits of data and random notes from 100+ hostel websites.

[...random tangent... I'm trying to stay focused on writing this intro, but I've also got Mikheil, from Georgia (the country) on his laptop at the other kitchen table... Albert & Alexis engrossed in rapid-fire conversation, fully committed to and energized by it, never mind their 50-year age difference... this is one of the nutty moments that reminds me... oh, wait, I've got a phone call or three... and what was I about to say?]

I just need to say that I'm fully engaged in my happily-nutty hostel, wanting it to survive and thrive.

(Oh yeah, and despite the fact that it's the best kind of problem to have, I'm still a little freaked out that we've got a 40-person group arriving on a bus in about 24 hours.)

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Rucksack Brian

8 years

Hey Bose, welcome to the Hostel Management community!

It sounds like you landed in exactly the right job. Congratulations! All of those crazy times when the whole world is connecting all around you and the buzz of excitement gets contagious are exactly what this industry is all about.

So, we went from having scathingly negative reviews (which we earned!) before I got here, to having heartfelt, happy good-byes at the end of weekends with a full house.

Great job turning around a troubled hostel! That’s the kind of opportunity that a lot of great managers dream of stumbling upon.

What were some of the biggest problems that you inherited, and what did you do to change the situation?

How many of the issues that you resolved had to do with operational problems, and how many were due to physical aspects of the hostel?

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Bose

8 years

Hey Brian... thanks for the welcome!

It was simpler stuff to fix... getting things clean, scouring the paper-based reservations files so I knew who to expect when, exuberant customer service by phone, email and at check-in, worrying enough about fuller nights and weekends to be well-prepared. I'm a 30-year IT guy, so standardizing basic forms and reports was a no-brainer.

It was a little less simple forging a good relationship with my owner/manager. He's a great guy for whom the hostel is a passion project, dwarfed by the rest of his endeavors (none in hospitality). I pissed him off on a regular basis, early on, by not following his some of his instructions to the letter. I'm just not a wait-for-permission guy when it strikes me that something needs to be done or changed. It's ended up being quirky but workable between us so far. Much more is still needed, it seems to me, to put us on more solid footing, but it's making for a fascinating challenge.

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Rucksack Brian

8 years

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, right? :)

It’s a good thing that you’re organized. Maybe you can compile some data from before and after you arrived to compare them side by side. If you go back to the owner with a comparison and show that revenue AND customer satisfaction have increased, then it may help to smooth things over. Perhaps even more so if you can also give a list of changes that you have made and go through each one with him to ask where his concerns lie and see if you can find a happy medium that works for both of you.

“I’m going to do it my way” doesn’t sounds very nice to an owner with a passion for a business that he developed himself. As an alternative, it might come across a bit nicer to say, “This worked pretty well, but I know you’re not happy with the method I used. Is there something else we could try to get the same results?” That could keep things moving forward and simultaneously preserve his sense of control over the business.

Do you think that would work?

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Bose

8 years

Thanks for your thoughts... It's actually been working OK between us for 5 months now; I have a good sense of what kinds of things I can shift or change and show him later (so he can accept or veto) vs. the things I need to get his buy-in on. In the initial weeks/months, his supervision was pretty close (via cams in the office, kitchen and lobby). Now, in our off-season, I see very little of him.

Without going into a lot of detail, it's a business that landed in his lap unexpectedly and while he's been great with a lot of physical plant improvements over the years, overall performance hasn't been so hot. In that context, he's been happy to have seen things running smoothly and without needing his constant attention.

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