Integrating Hostelhops.com

Years ago, we signed up for the Open Travel Exchange (OTE).  If you want to know more about that look here https://hostelmanagement.com/forums/open-travel-exchange.html.  We liked that it integrated with our channel manager (myallocator) but we never really did much with it.

Checking back in with it it seems that they have merged with hostelhops.com (or at least hostelhops has become the booking front end for all reservations).  Today I installed the hostelhops chrome extension and intend to try it out.  OTE is still the backbone to the whole thing as far as I can tell, but hostelhops is now the public face of it.

The reason we have gone back to re-examine OTE is that here in the midwest USA, several hostels are looking for a way to easily send guests to one another with confirmed bookings and secure credit card info.  We've decided to take this technology and bend it to our will.  

The way it is supposed to work is that I sit a guest down at my front desk and book their stay in their next city through OTE.  I collect a 12% deposit directly from the guest that I get to keep.  When the guest goes to the next hostel they have to pay the remaining 88% (or they will be billed that amount on their credit card if the destination hostel chooses to pull their cc info off of OTE).  Finally, I would be billed for 2% of the booking amount (as long as it is not cancelled by myself, the guest, or the destination hostel) and the 10% left from what I had collected of the original 12% is all profit for me.

Instead, a group of us have decided to pilot a program where we will complete bookings into our network of friendly hostels through OTE and voluntarily only charge the guest the 2% that we will later be billed from OTE.  We are essentially going to forfeit the 10% profit we would get and offer it to the guest as a discount for booking direct through our small network.  We feel this will be a good incentive to make the guest want to come to our front desk to make their next reservation.  We plan to let our guests in on this discount via signage in the hostel.  We will work the bugs out between us and one other hostel before we open the program to our larger group.  This is all still just in testing and we may later decide to set the amount of profit kept at the hostel from each booking as anywhere from 0% to 10% (when our larger group decides).  We hope it will be a good and secure way to book into each other's hostels and support each other.  I will periodically post about the progress.

I really wanted to start this thread because I couldn't find anything searching Hostelhops on the forum.  Could anyone offer advice or more information about using this service.  Is anyone else using the service in this way?