COVID-19 Shutdown: Adopt-A-Hostel can help!

Hey everyone, is your hostel closed because of coven 19 or some other calamity that may be facing you in the future and you're not really sure how you're going to pay the bills during this temporary closure. In this video we're going to explore gift cards and how gift cards helped my hostel and I'll show you how you can sell gift cards for 0% commission during the coven 19 crisis and how you can sign up with other hostels to be part of a larger publicity campaign to keep small independent hostels open. Hey everyone, I wanted to share with you the progress that we made on our gift card campaign. I know a lot of hostels are con contemplating gift card campaigns or have already done gift card campaigns, so for those of you who've already done it, this may be old news, but a lot of them, a lot of hostels are sitting on the fence and wondering whether or not they should do a gift card PR campaign for their hostel. And I have to say that the results of our gift card campaign, we're truly amazing, astounding, heartwarming of everything. All of the above. So what we did is we took our, uh, previous guests from hostel snap, that's the PMs system that we use and we sent out aK a an appeal and basically said, you know, Hey, we're struggling right now because we have zero guests. All of the bills still have to be paid if the hostel is going to survive. And, um, the, it was written by Courtney [inaudible] who was my former manager at, um, my hostel and she was also previously the editor on hostile management.com. And she managed to really, first of all, evoke a real emotional reaction. What she was attempting to do with it is really kind of put guests, previous guests back into the mindset of how they felt both when they arrived at, uh, at Pacific Tradewinds hostel and, um, what they felt like when they left that place. We're a very small, hostile, very intimate, uh, atmosphere. And so really people have amazing experiences there. And that's one of the things that's been our, uh, our huge claim to fame. Um, so she really invoked that. Well. And then we did a gift card campaign. Let me actually show you the site, uh, called gift up. And we used this app called gift up and I'm going to tell you in a minute how to get free commissions on your gift card campaigns up to 5,000 euros with gift up. Uh, but the process was fairly straightforward. You go in and you actually create an account. You do need to have a Stripe account. So your hostel needs to be in a country where you can connect your bank account to your Stripe account. And I think at present Stripe can work in about 26 different countries, although we've heard from hostels that are outside of those 26 countries, but they have a bank account either in Europe or the United States. And that works too, as long as you can have a us or a European bank, one of those 26 countries to receive the funds into because gift up basis ticklish in order to transfer the money right into your bank. Um, so we already had a Stripe account cause that's what we use for our PMs system and receiving direct bookings at our hostel. But for other hostels, that process might take you another five, 10 minutes to fill out the application. And then there's like two days later they have to verify that some micropayments went in to your account so that they have the right account. But anyway, the process was fairly straightforward. Uh, we sent out the email if somebody else's out there is using hostel snap, just contact us and we can actually give you a CSV of all of your previous guests at your hostel so that you can use that on either like MailChimp or CIN grid or a constant contact, any of those platforms that can send bulk emails. Uh, and then of course we promoted it on our social media campaigns and such. But, um, our result was $1,800 that we made. And honestly that was so helpful this month in terms of being able to pay the bills. And it was really, really helpful for just my, uh, my state of mind. Uh, I was feeling very down in the dumps and just having all of these previous guests reaching out and just gushing about, uh, my hostel and what an amazing experience it was. Um, there was a couple that, a couple of different guests that said that they met there, met their best friend there. And so, um, if you need a morale boost, you know, not only as a gift card campaign, good for, you know, paying the bills and basically, you know, to hold you over until you're able to open again. But it's really good as an owner for your morale, uh, as well. So I wanted to tell you about, uh, adopt a hostel and let me go back over to the screen. Um, adopt a hostel is something that's being put on by Lee your at hostel consulting, uh, stay the night and budget traveler.org they put together this program and they are no, and they're hoping to get some big publicity from travel bloggers and maybe even mainstream media given that hostels have such small margins. We basically have no income. Many of us have no income at this time. Um, they, they, they feel like that they can get some legs in terms of the PR for this. So, uh, you'll want to look at this article. He also links over to the articles over at budget traveler and stay the night. But, um, they actually have a step by step guides of everything that you need to do in order to sign up for the gift up a program. And they also will include a promo code that you can use on your gift up account so that as you can see, normally they would charge 3.49% fee of everything that you've sold through the gift cards, but they're waiving that fee for the first 5,000 euros, which is amazing. So gift up, uh, is doing great things for hostels and, uh, you know, this is one of the ways you can just sign up and you can kind of get on the list of hostels that people can choose to support. Uh, as we all know, there are people who, um, really know and love hostels. Hostels are their lifeblood are. Many of our customers have been touched for life by the communities that we create in our hostels. And, um, I really encourage you to, uh, reach out to them. I was a real little sheepish to tell you the truth because I was like, ah, you know, you know, they're, they're paying me money and I'm not able to provide any service at this time. But, um, the, the, the support that we got from them and just, they're just, it really just feeds you. So that's why I say you really should consider doing it. Uh, if you haven't, if you're on the fence and you're, or you haven't considered it, so, um, I wanted to tell you about that and that's all I have for this particular video. But, uh, yeah, let me know if you have any questions in the comments. Um, and I can probably point you in the right directions. Alright. Thanks a lot.