Dear Mr. Hostelworld

Dear Mr. Hostelworld,
on your nice little videoclip at http://www.hostelworld.com/videos/16/around-the-world-in-156-seconds.../ it looks as if you own the world, the whole world of hostelling.
But you dont.
When i read all the threads about booking engines here on hostelmanagement.com my first thought was that you are doing like the Microsofties (Gates/Ballmer) do, meaning you are abusing your monopoly (about 90% of marketshare) to keep the competitors down.The M-softies were sentenced to pay hundreds of millions of Euros because of the abuse of their monopoly in desktop operating systems to enforce their Internet Explorer and they still are in court with the EU because they now do the same with their media player. It seems they dont care too much about the fine as long as it helps to keep the competitors down, meaning it pays for them in the long turn to act illegaly. But the longer i was thinking about it the more it became clear for me that your case is significantly different from the Microsofties case.
Of course your intention seems to be more or less the same meaning to keep the competitors down, which in pure capitalism isnt a crime for itself and in a certain amount is even necessary for surviving.
But.
You have choosen a deadly wrong way by taking the hostels as your hostages by pointing the gun right at their chest yelling "Use my PM or you will suffer!" (PM = Property Managementsystem) That's exactly what you are doing regarding the use of an automated interface to your Booking Engine.
Keeping a booking engine updated manually is a hell of a lot of work, thats why hostels want to use software to do the work. But the software you are offering for this is a simple "NO WAY!", "NEVER!" for most of the hostels i have met yet. Want to know why?

- Online only? NEVER!
"Whenever the internet connection gets lost my whole business will crash without any booking data available."

- Saving 100 Percent of the bookings on the server of a foreign company? NEVER!
"This company will know everything about my business, every single cent that crosses my reception will be recognized by this company."

- Beeing forced to one Booking Engine only? NO WAY!
"Other BEs offer different advantages and i need to offer my beds on as many platforms as possible to keep my business running. The software must support this"

- Browser based software only? WHY?
"The possibilities of todays browsers are still so limited. Every second mouseclick results in a complete rebuild of the screen, flickering and considerable time to wait, simply annoying."
Well done software running on the local machine never flickers and will have no recognizable response time, it simply does what you expect it for at the same moment you need it.

- "Putting as much trust in a company to let them know ALL of my customers data, ALL my bookings data, ALL my data about my income, even ALL about how my staff is organized by the login data, simply everything that is important for my business?"
They say their PM software is for free, but it will cost you much more than only money, it costs your INDEPENDENCE.

As a summarize this means to a hostel:
- "We have to face HEAVY counting disadvantages if we are forced to use the Hostelworld Online Property Management System called Backpack Online".
- "If we want to use the HW Booking Engine we CAN NOT use the tools of our choice for our property beause HW does not allow us to use different PM software but the one they are offering."

And this is the major difference between the Microsofties case and your case:
The M-softies offer more or less the same tools like their competitors do and therefor the customers only get damaged indirectly by cutting off innovation and competition in the industry.
What Hostelworld does is much worse:
You are confronting your customers with a direct and uncovered threat, therefor causing them direct and countable (in hours of work additinally spent and paid) damage.
This is called blackmailing in most civilized countries in this world and you will typically be sentenced to spend a significant amount of your future time in an accomodation run by the proper state itself for free, paid by the taxpayers of that certain country whether you like it or not.
And BTW this could become a very interesting case for the lawyers in this world regarding globalization:
If mr. HW has blackmailed the hostels in a certain country and therefor has been sent to jail there, is he still guilty of blackmailing other hostels in another part of the world because he has committed another crime in that other country? Meaning robin-go-round the whole worlds jails for the next ... lets say 156 years ...?
Wouldnt it be a shame if you personally could not travel any more to other countries without fear of always beeing sent to jail there because of having blackmailed the hostels in that certain country?

Hostelworld is the biggest player in hostel accomodation worldwide. Please be prudent and make your XML-interface (API) publicly available to everyone, without any attempt for blackholes or foottraps like they are well known from the Microsofties. Nobody is interested in starting a mud fight causing more or less damage to everyone involved. But with your success in generating worldwide bookings you also have a responsibility for the industry. Stop abusing it like you are doing right now as you will not profit in the long run. We all live in the 21 century, in a world of globalization and there is information that is no longer privately owned when people in the whole world depend on it. Microsoft has been forced to open their programming specifications by the EU. Do you really want to read the news saying "Hostelworld beeing forced to open their programming interface by EU-court"?

And for those who doubt the technical implications of my accusations. HW offers since many years the programming interface (API) to their Booking Engine to certain companies, they still offer an API to non-competitors based on XML.
For a well educated internet programmer it is a question of days to implement a programming interface based on XML. It has been done a thousand times before especially in the hotel business. There is even an opensource implementation supported by the mayor players of the industry called Open Travel Alliance at www.opentravel.org which is a perfect starting point for developers. Hostelsclub.com in Venice already did the implementation with their Booking Engine which works very nice.

Please start thinking of yourself as a member of the globalized world and not as a master about your 10.000 servants, called hostelmanagers.
Peter K.
software developer
Berlin