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Are you working with your competitors?

General Hostel Operations

montrealnewgreenhostel started this discussion 15 years 7 months ago

Hi all !
I have a question for you ; how is your relationship with your local competitors?
I heard many stories and it seemed to vary from place to place, how is it in your city?
Are you participating in some lobby to promote hostels to your local tourism board ? Are you involved in a cheap dorm bed price war ? Are you recommending them if your hostel is full ? How is it in your area ?
Any good stoiries ? Any bad stories ?
Thanks for sharing this on the forum, your posts will hopefully help me understanding better the local competitors dynamics :)

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Josh Hostels

15 years

When I was working in hostels I would try to maintain good relations with other local hostels (e.g., call them up whenever we had extra guests to see if they had availability). Competition can be friendly, and there were enough backpackers to go around.

I've seen some really bad hostel relationships. One hostel in a city made a "guide to hostels" in their region that only included their own hostel in their city. So another hostel retaliated with a full-blown "hostel reviews site" for their region, with their own hostel having good reviews and the competition having bad reviews. The would also post fake bad reviews about their competitors on 3rd party sites. :confused:

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GirlScoutFWB

15 years

@montrealnewgreenhostel, good question!

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Alexski

15 years

In the city that I am starting my hostel in (I'm in the process right now :D), I've heard rumours from several hostel staff from 2 competing hostels that the hostel owners are rigging their reviews on one of the hostelbooking websites. My guess is that these owners book to stay at their own hostels when business is slow and then submit a bogus review.

Although I've never seen any badmouthing about the "other guy" here... the hostel ratings from these 2 hostels are a lot higher than they should be.

Is this even possible?? Anyway, I'm finding out that here that the hostel business is pretty sneaky.

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stozza

15 years

Hi all !
I have a question for you ; how is your relationship with your local competitors?

For us, we are friendly with one hostel, which we consider our sister hostel, mostly because I used to run that one. And one of my staff is the boyfriend of the assistant manager of another hostel. Other than that we don't communicate with any other hostels normally.

I used to go to a quiz night where we competed against other hostels, which was cool.

We do call each other up if we are full and are looking for beds for people, and we also sometimes inform each other about bad guests, but nothing is formally organised.

Mostly we are in a massive price war which is killing us all, though.

I can get a bed here, even in July, for half of what it cost when I arrived here 10 years ago, in which time the staff wages have doubled, the booking engines have got a 10% cut of everything and the quality expected is much higher.

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Josh Hostels

15 years

Mostly we are in a massive price war which is killing us all, though.

I can get a bed here, even in July, for half of what it cost when I arrived here 10 years ago, in which time the staff wages have doubled, the booking engines have got a 10% cut of everything and the quality expected is much higher.

That's an interesting topic for a forum thread. I started a thread here:
http://www.hostelmanagement.com/forums/how-maintain-income-during-price-war.html

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nyrie

15 years

we have a great relationship with the closest hostel to us. we send guests to each other when we are full, and their guests come to our bar to drink. since we both offer different things, it works well between us, and there are no price wars in our town. before our hostel opened, it was a boys club in our town. now the playing field is even, but the two other hostels run by guys tend to slate me and the other hostel, which is sad.

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PatrickO`D

15 years

Hi all !
I have a question for you ; how is your relationship with your local competitors?
I heard many stories and it seemed to vary from place to place, how is it in your city?
Are you participating in some lobby to promote hostels to your local tourism board ? Are you involved in a cheap dorm bed price war ? Are you recommending them if your hostel is full ? How is it in your area ?
Any good stoiries ? Any bad stories ?
Thanks for sharing this on the forum, your posts will hopefully help me understanding better the local competitors dynamics :)

If we are full I will call the other Hostels to check for availability as a matter of guest service. When I am traveling and staying in a Hostel, if I see something about the hostel that I do not agree with, I do not mention that Hostel by name as a matter of professional courtesy. I think Hostels should work with there local CVB to promote Hostels, but do not know of any Hostels that do it. My service philosophy is simple;"The guest always comes first". If I know that a couple of Hostels are price fixing in a Locality, I will not recommend/suggest that destination to my guests.

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crhostel

15 years

Where we are, we have a pretty good relationship with other hostels in town. We share "black lists" for troublesome guests, and immediately notify other hostels in the case anything criminal happens. We also have an informal arrangement among the top hostels not to get into a price war with our dorm beds. We leave the private rooms up to the individual owner, but we keep the dorm beds set on an agreed upon rate. This is price fixing, and can be seen as anti-competitive, but this allows the hostels in our area to focus on quality service. If we all have the same price, it's the hostel that offers the best service that is going to succeed, and raises everyone's level of service.

Any idiot can drop their rates below ours, but these are the B team hostels in our area, and their reviews reflect their service. Even though they offer much cheaper dorm beds, some even as much as 25% lower than the top hostels, they're consistently the poorest reviewed establishments.

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