Software for taking online bookings

Synchronizing different allocations was never our biggest pain in the ass, so I haven´t thought about it too much.

I absolutely see the point that this must be very time-consuming for small hostels in a highly competetive market like Budapest.

This concept would offer even more than diversifying marketing channels.

I can imagine the moments of your staff when you upload your allocations in your Munich hostel for the Octoberfest! Regarding what you told us before, it could be a pain in the ass to process all those booking manually within that small time!

Also have you thought about it how much work you can save to your staff (which they could spend with your guests as "Nietzsche time" ;) ) using just one click instead of manual processing? Or not to worry about how to set up your allocation best in order to get the best sales, if HW wouldn't sell as many beds?

It would cut the time of administration for the favor of efficiency, so even a bigger hostel can have advantages of it! :) So why wouldn't suit for your chain of 1200 beds?

If let's say you have a full house and an average time spent on administrating bookings is just one minute (and that's a very good time, IMHO), that would be 40 hours a month for all 1200 beds (This suspecting an average 5 bed nights per booking). This is how much your reception can spend with processing reservations into your system manually.

If you pay 10EUR per hour including taxes, that would be even more as the server version (a 4 licensed server is 350EUR vs your 400EUR per month for the first year and even you can save 25% more if you pay all in once instead of monthly) so you would have the software paid off for the first year and it would generate an estimated further 4800EUR per year savings for your chain. Not much comparing your incomes but I'd still accept it as a bonus! :D

We shouldn´t hold our breath until HW or HB sorts that out because they won´t.

All right, but do you think they would listen to individual hostels, or even to such big chain like yours? What would be their interest on this feature?
Let's see HW for example, liberating the market is definitely not an advantage for them.
Even if they don't generate as many bookings as before, they still have expected allocations... it will only be worth for them when they go down to second place, otherwise they could have a "let the neighbors cow die if mine is dead" policy... So if they don't sell enough beds, at least other engines won't be able as well. not very hostel friendly though...

How would you convince them then?

How will they realize that, the more engines are present, the more guests will reserve on the market, they just have to be better than the others in order to extend (or keep) their share?
When will they realize that competition is also a good meter of the satisfaction of their costumers and they alone won't be able to convince people to stay in hostels?

So - if the hostels don´t caugh up somethings on their own it won´t happen. I think open source is the way to go. Sooner or later, somebody will come up with a basic version of something and then --- there are many geeks in many hostels who can improve it. We just need to get the snowball running.

IMHO, this debate made a spotlight on this concept so it would be good for the entire industry. We just need to build the snowball big enough to catch an avalanche... but we need more hostels sharing the same opinion.

They offer an opinion as well. The more ratings I get, the happier I am because they are really useful to identify problems. You are right though, commentless ratings are indeed lower - 2.5% in our case, I just checked that up. By the way, hint! The rating report now shows nationalities. You can c&p the whole page into an excel sheet and then sort the ratings by nationality. Quite interesting results here!

I've noticed the same thing about anonym reviews! Thanks for letting me know! :)

I found the reviews lower rated coming from our own website in the past (using HW engine as well) comparing to HW reviews... Although I wanted to check it recently but surprisingly couldn't find any of them for this year... nor the previous years! Need to check my archives then... :mad:

Why did HW change the policy for reviews coming from own site?

Good job! ;)

hopefully klaus can get them to include the gender of the guests on the bookings too, like HB. its not too much of an issue but ive always tried to avoid putting single girls in a room full of guys - hard to do when you've no idea of the gender of whos coming in beyond a guess based on their first name.

I agree. That could be even more tough with Asian girls... they are the most careful about mixed dorms and the hardest to guess from their name... so what would be the gender of Ju Yi for example?

hermaphrodite? :p
ive even been caught out with western names - who names their girl 'Brett'?

I can imagine the moments of your staff when you upload your allocations in your Munich hostel for the Octoberfest! Regarding what you told us before, it could be a pain in the ass to process all those booking manually within that small time!

Don´t worry about the staff. I do that all by myself. Moi! It is fun. No machine will ever do that! :)
Besides, especially in that case it really needs to be done manually. When you sell around 5000 bed nights in ten minutes, you can imagine that only a part of all the people trying to book will get what they want. There are many cases when people book anything left and lots of multiple or otherwise weird bookings as well. It really needs a human interface.

Also have you thought about it how much work you can save to your staff (which they could spend with your guests as "Nietzsche time" ;) ) using just one click instead of manual processing? Or not to worry about how to set up your allocation best in order to get the best sales, if HW wouldn't sell as many beds?

It would cut the time of administration for the favor of efficiency, so even a bigger hostel can have advantages of it! :) So why wouldn't suit for your chain of 1200 beds?

If let's say you have a full house and an average time spent on administrating bookings is just one minute (and that's a very good time, IMHO), that would be 40 hours a month for all 1200 beds (This suspecting an average 5 bed nights per booking). This is how much your reception can spend with processing reservations into your system manually.

If you pay 10EUR per hour including taxes, that would be even more as the server version (a 4 licensed server is 350EUR vs your 400EUR per month for the first year and even you can save 25% more if you pay all in once instead of monthly) so you would have the software paid off for the first year and it would generate an estimated further 4800EUR per year savings for your chain. Not much comparing your incomes but I'd still accept it as a bonus! :D

OK, this is how we set up our allocation: we throw 30 dorm beds per house at Hostelbookers and never look at it again. We don´t really synchronize anything. We have a software to synchronize our availabilities with Hostelworld (we put everything less 40 beds online). Not much fuss there.
I can see your point with manual processing of bookings. Anyway, much of it is done by the nightshift guys when there is nobody around to spend Nietzsche time with.
Besides that, I insist humans can do it better than a machine. Example: we have two hostels in Vienna; many times, people book one night in one hostel and a second night at the other one, because nothing is available online for both nights in the same house. A bright human mind will conclude that this person certainly doesn´t want to move and fix the problem. A machine won´t.

All right, but do you think they would listen to individual hostels, or even to such big chain like yours? What would be their interest on this feature?
Let's see HW for example, liberating the market is definitely not an advantage for them.
Even if they don't generate as many bookings as before, they still have expected allocations... it will only be worth for them when they go down to second place, otherwise they could have a "let the neighbors cow die if mine is dead" policy... So if they don't sell enough beds, at least other engines won't be able as well. not very hostel friendly though...

How would you convince them then?

How will they realize that, the more engines are present, the more guests will reserve on the market, they just have to be better than the others in order to extend (or keep) their share?
When will they realize that competition is also a good meter of the satisfaction of their costumers and they alone won't be able to convince people to stay in hostels?

I wouldn´t try to convinve anyone of something which is not in his genuine interest. It only works with stupid people and I don´t deal with idiots. You are right that it wouldn´t be in HW´s interest to help other booking sites.

I don´t really think more booking sites around would be any good. People want to book a hostel at the end of the day, not use a booking site for the sake of it. There are zillions of hotel booking sites, and it hasn´t improved the hotels, brought more guests to them or made the hotels´ work easier.

I think the situation is pretty good as it is. There is one dominant player - Hostelworld - but trust me they know full well they can´t sit on their asses doing nothing for too long. Hostelbookers is big enough to survive and big enough to be a constant reminder to HW that they´re not alone out there. That´s quite sufficient in my opinion.

I do think Hostelworld listens to the hostels. I have a good working relationship with them. I deal with the same person there since nine years. They have done quite a few things I have asked them to do. Like the gimmick with nationalities in the rating report, for example. That took them only one or two weeks. Other things took them longer, like ending review censorship. I cried out for that for almost three years because I think it only helps bad hostels. I got that done, too - with more than a little help from other people.

Maybe I can make things happen because we´re an important customer. But then, we don´t contribute more than 0.5% of their revenue, so we´re not that important obviously. Sometimes you can convince people by being convincing, sometimes you convince them by being a pain in the ass.

IMHO, this debate made a spotlight on this concept so it would be good for the entire industry. We just need to build the snowball big enough to catch an avalanche... but we need more hostels sharing the same opinion.

Most of all, we neet to bring a critical mass of geeks together.

I found the reviews lower rated coming from our own website in the past (using HW engine as well) comparing to HW reviews... Although I wanted to check it recently but surprisingly couldn't find any of them for this year... nor the previous years! Need to check my archives then... :mad:

Why did HW change the policy for reviews coming from own site?

Beg your pardon? HW didn´t change anything.