What is the priority to be in the membership of the Hostelling International ?

I've been looking into this because it's strange that WRI/Hostelworld would refuse to list all hostels in a city.

Here's a screenshot from Hostels.com from today:

"Every Hostel, Everywhere!"
[obviously not accurate since they only list a few dozen of the Buenos Aires Hostels]

"Find any hostel, anywhere in the world ...more hostels listed than any other website"
[I think tfthostels.com has more hostels listed than Hostels.com because tfthostels.com aggregates hostels from multiple booking engines. It should have all the hostels from Hostels.com as well as the other booking engines.]

HI Argentina won't give any new memberships to anyone in Buenos Aires as they have already to many HI hostels there....

The issue with hostelworld and not accepting any more hostels for Buenos Aires is due to the "" Rome Effect ""...

some years ago Rome experienced a growing tendency of hostels. Within months the number of hostels triplicated or even more. Some of the hostels were great (great facilities, top standards) but some others were from people that just thought hostels were good business at the time so they opened a hostel in their 5 empty rooms from their granny's house (this meaning that the hostel was quite rough and way too far from the standars we all pretend to find in a hostel).

So picture a city with 300 hundred hostels where you find a hostel like Wake Up, Base or YHA Railway Hostel in Sydney and then really cheap, old, poor service hostels....In order to compete with the big hostels, the little ones where bringing down rates in order to catch some market. What they were actually doing is ruining the big hostels as they had lots of expenses to cover and as the small hostels were bringing down the rates, they had to do so.

Some of those big hostels, couldn't survive that "low rate effect" for a long time and they closed or went bankrupt.

Today, in Buenos Aires, exactly the same thing is going on. In the last 4 years hostels are blooming everywhere. Some of this new hostels are great, managed by people that has been in the industry for many years now, but some others are being opened by opportunists or people that just think it is a good businnes but have no idea on how tough is it to run a good hostel.

So, what it's being tried is to avoid small hostels to do so in Buenos Aires, because it would create a chaos. If u take a look, pretty much all the hostels listed have over 120 beds and the ones with less, are probably the first hostels that were listed in Buenos Aires....

Do you know which big hostels had to close?

Not the names, no....

I can see that happening, but shouldn't the customer feedback system sort out the well-run hostels from the opportunists who can't run good hostels?

I agree, but we were being asked why hostelworld is filtering hostels in Buenos Aires....As i see it, you all guys, save some money and wait 6/8 months and the buy/sell thread will be full of hostels from Buenos Aires....