i am about to open a hostel in Portugal. Initially should i sign up 90% of beds to hostelworld¿ in order to ensure high occupancy rate¿ does anyone knows the conditions to work with Hostelworld¿ can i change the amounts of bed assigned to hostelworld anytime¿
15 years
Good question.
I also heard that Hostelworld has a tool that receives all the bookings from hostelworld and other hostel sites as hostelbookers.com, gomo.com, etc... to avoid overbookings. Can anyone confirm me this?
Licinio, did you find all the legislation that you were looking? Already open the hostel? You are like speddy Gonzalez!!! Eheheheh. :D:D
Good luck with it. Where it will be the spot?
15 years
From what I know you can choose a certain amount of beds with HostelWorld and another amount of beds with HostelsClub or Hostelz.com, etc if you want to split up your beds that way. There is a program where you can put all your availability in one interface and it communicates with the rest of the booking engines like Gomio, Hostels.com, etc. called HostelPower.
http://www.hostelpower.com/ASPX/Home.aspx
They have a free 30 day trial too. I would recommend splitting up a certain portion of beds with different booking engines at first so you don't have over booking issues but also so you can easily see who fills up your beds the most and then allocate the beds based on that.
15 years
Interesting.
I already checked their website.
Just didnt understood one thing.
Does it work with hostelworld? only with the other ones webistes like Gomio?
How should i split beds?
How would U Do?
Thanks!
15 years
Yes it works with many booking engines including Hostelworld and Gomio. You can contact them and they can answer exactly how it works, but I have heard that it works well and saves time and headaches, because it has many other administrative functions.
It all depends on how much time you want to spend on each back office of each site. There are some hostels which prefer to allocate 10 beds to each booking site for example, so you know there will never be overlap, and like I mentioned once you see who is bringing more bookings, then you can allocate more beds to that booking engine and easily remove the availability from the others. These programs are just a way to reduce headaches and have one interface you would be working with instead of logging into each back office everyday and updating availability manually with each system. I would try doing that at first on my own before having an additional expense of a channel manager, but since it's free for a month, it can't hurt to try it out. :)
15 years
You are right! why not give it a try since they have free trial.
Just one more question!
From hostelworld they only charge this 10% from customers, would we have to pay something more to them? Is it quick to put our hostel online?
15 years
What I did was sign up to hostelworld only for now, and use their BackPack Online system. the pros
1. Its FREE!
2. It collects automatically your bookings from hostelworld, hostels.com and any of their partners
3. you can use their booking system on your website and u get some of the comission fee they charge when people makes a booking.
4. It's completely online. I can access it even from my iPhone when Im away.
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Which brings to my question. I have just signed up to Hostelbookers. So I had to split my beds between hostelworld (and its affiliates) and hostelbookers. So far Hostelbookers only gave me 3 bookings in 2 weeks, while I get at least 3 everyday on hostelworld.
Hostelworld knows exactly how many beds I have available because of BackPack Online (BPO). So when i get an walk-in reservation or email reservation, phone, whatever, it already takes out of their website.
But with Hostelbookers I have to do it manually. So the question is. Is it worth the trouble of having to manage both sites, and be exposed to overbooking?
15 years
So the question is. Is it worth the trouble of having to manage both sites, and be exposed to overbooking?
I think it´s worth it just to keep one competitor of Hostelworld alive. If HW would be completely alone on that market who knows how long it would take them to go crazy and screw us all over!
15 years
I'm using HW and BPO, find it good, as you say, availability is automatically adjusted for phone bookings etc. I've never used any other software that adjusts availability for HW, HB and others automatically. I'm told they exist, but not sure how they work - my fear is that if the booking engines don't officially support these 3rd party solutions they could easily deny access to tehm to check and update availibility. Though I have no idea if this is true.
I feel the best business sense for me is to push as many bookings through our website, as we get the majority of the deposit money back. We lose that money with HB and HW website bookings. Also it depends a bit where you are located. I think that the more traditional backpackers are attracted to your location, the more you'll need to spread your net - they use HB a lot more in my opinion.
As to whether HW will "go crazy and screw us all over", that's certainly a possibility, markets tend to operate like that. If they did though I could see others coming up. I think they realise that - if owners are totally dissatisfied they can move their business away from HW.
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