I'm just curious regarding how affiliate sales are reported to the hostel concerned -- are you told what the refering site is?
What I mean is, if a hostel runs some of their reservations through say HostelWorld, who in turn make the information available to their affiliates, if a customer makes a reservation from an affiliate site, does HostelWorld inform the property of the identity of the affiliate?
Thanks!
16 years
does HostelWorld inform the property of the identity of the affiliate?
Yes, they do. The property can check an affiliates report at the hostel's inbox.
Also, if you are an affiliate of HW, you can have your P2P report from which you can check nationalities, next bookings, etc. could be handy. If you have your account already, you can check these features here.
15 years
I think HostelWorld does this but I'm not sure about the other booking services like HostelBookers.
A few years ago when I worked exclusively with HostelWorld I would often visit hostels that would tell me that they had a lot of sales referred to them by my site. I don't get this as often now that I work mostly with HostelBookers.
15 years
Thanks for the replies both.
TimU - why did you decide to shift focus towards HB?
15 years
TimU - why did you decide to shift focus towards HB?
Several reasons:
1) I find that HostelWorld has added a lot of extra content to their site, which means it starts to compete with their affiliates.
One thing that I was very unhappy with is the way that they started putting reviews on a prominent position on their site. I had reviews on my site for years and all of a sudden HW has more reviews than me and I am sending them the business.
HB also has reviews, but they are not featured as prominently as HW. I would seriously consider dropping HB if they moved them to a more prominent position on their site. However I have now put so much work into integrating HB into my site that moving to another booking service would take six months or more of work.
One more thing is how HW have the free downloadable PDF destination guides. Sure they are pretty basic compared to what I am planning - and what you are doing - but why send your customers to a company that is competing with your main revenue stream.
2) HostelBookers pay a higher commission.
3) HostelBookers don't charge travellers a booking fee, which means that the conversion rate is a LOT higher than HW. I am moving toward an exclusive relationship with HB and once I have taken off the old HW and HT links from my site I will be able to promote the "no booking fee" feature across my site.
4) HB are number two, which means they try harder. But they are still big enough to have more hostels signed up than Hostels Club and Hostel Traveler.
15 years
Hi Tim,
Thanks for the detailed answer.
Re commissions, HB got in touch with us a while ago and offered to jack up the commission rate if we stopped working with HW, we refused -- but, in case you weren't aware, the commission rates from both HB and HW are "open to negotiation". If you're angling towards working solely with HB, I'd suggest leveraging an increase in commission for the favour!
Odd re the conversion, as our experience has been the opposite -- we give HW and HB almost equal exposure on the site, yet the conversion for HW is almost double that of HB -- they have a similar range of properties in the countries we cover.
With the PDF guides, yeah, they're becoming more and more common - Tripadvisor also have them for free plus there's the ArrivalGuides mob, and I think we're one of the few operators who charge for them, but we're seeing steady growth in that regard ... think the old adage of you get what you pay for still holds true in this regard.
Anyways, thanks for your thoughts -- appreciated.
15 years
HB got in touch with us a while ago and offered to jack up the commission rate if we stopped working with HW, we refused -- but, in case you weren't aware, the commission rates from both HB and HW are "open to negotiation". If you're angling towards working solely with HB, I'd suggest leveraging an increase in commission for the favour!
There are advantages to working with multiple booking services and advantages to an exclusive arrangement. I think for us it makes sense to have an exclusive deal so we can provide a complete end-to-end solution. I currently have a couple of programmers in India working on a more user friendly booking engine to boost my conversion rate and this is a lot easier if I am working with only one booking service.
Thanks for the tip about the commission. I will certainly angle for a commission increase when I take the last HW booking link off my site.
Odd re the conversion, as our experience has been the opposite -- we give HW and HB almost equal exposure on the site, yet the conversion for HW is almost double that of HB -- they have a similar range of properties in the countries we cover.
I have heard this from a few other people, but when I started working with HB my sales conversions shot up right away. I think the "no booking fee" is a big thing, but the hostels need to have beds allocated to HB and many will just assign their beds to the largest booking service; which may explain why you get more bookings through HW. Travellers can't book if the beds aren't available.
With the PDF guides, yeah, they're becoming more and more common - Tripadvisor also have them for free plus there's the ArrivalGuides mob, and I think we're one of the few operators who charge for them, but we're seeing steady growth in that regard ... think the old adage of you get what you pay for still holds true in this regard.
Well the Arrival Guides and HW's PDF guides are pretty basic and don't have the detailed info that you would find in a proper guidebook. But your guides, and what I have planned, seem to be as thorough and detailed as a proper guidebook so they are worth the money. When I bring mine out a guide to a city will sell for only £1 or $2 so it's an easy impulse buy and from what I recall your guides have a similar price. But they are worth the money so they should do well. If more companies sell downloadable guides, travellers will become accustomed to them and more people will pay for them. I would love to discuss this further but I don't think this forum is the best place for it. I'll PM you with more questions.
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