I saw this business card in a coffee shop while up in Canada. I like that it shows they have a lot of social media profiles. It links to a website, and also to their Twitter profile.

The "@BlenzCoffee" at the top shows customers that they are Twitter-savvy. The social media icons at the bottom let customers know that they can connect with the cafe on their favorite social media website. The cafe offers free wireless Internet, so it's easy for customers to immediately check out the business online.

Hostels also have a lot of customers with laptops who might pick up a social media oriented business card and immediately look up the hostel's online profiles. It might be a good way to get a lot of Twitter and Facebook followers. (Social media = free word of mouth marketing.)

For a hostel to adapt to something like this, I think it would be better to use the hostel's main website for the main contact information (instead of a .tel domain which the hostel doesn't entirely control). Or a specific page like example.com/connect that links to the URLs of all of the hostel's social media profiles.

I've seen a few businesses prominently featuring their Twitter profile lately. In Seattle there was even a street vendor with a gigantic Twitter URL on the side of the cart. Twitter is getting mainstream...

Just wanted to share some personal experience about some banners we purchased. We had the luck have having an awesome "Tinker's Station" sign out front when we bought our property, though there was no indication of what we were going to do. We decided to get two banners telling the world we were making a hostel and giving our web address and our internet traffic spiked a couple of hundred hits for the next few days!

Obviously this might not sound like much for some of the bigger hostels, but for a small little startup in a town of 100, it felt pretty good. Here's a few pictures of the banners (covered in a bit of snow):

Sex sells. It sells pretty much anything... from cars, to razors to sandwiches

and lets face it, for backpackers 'sex and booze' is a big part of travelling/hostelling. yet i've seen very little use of sex in the marketing of hostels. hotels do it (vegas baby!), bars do it (do i really need to provide examples?), why not hostels which are by and large far more conducive to sex than your average hotel or bar?

now there are some examples of it - most photos of hostels involve relatively good looking/photogenic people and if its a hostel near the beach you're pretty much guaranteed a few shots of girls in bikinis. there was also that really weird video posted here a while back for a hostel in berlin... but when compared to a lot of other industries, sex appeal seems to be distinctly lacking in hostel marketing.

is there a way of bringing 'sexy' back to hostelling? are there any hostels out there (the rising cock perhaps?) that consider themselves 'sexy'? if backpackers are out there trying to get flags, im kind of surprised at the fact that hostels arent tripping over themselves trying to present themselves as fun, fashionable and above all SEXY.

any thoughts?

Several years ago I dropped off hundreds of free mousemats at hostels in Australia and New Zealand as I reviewed hostels for BUG's guidebooks. This seemed to work well, but this time I am thinking about fridge magnets when I review hostels in North America later this year. They are cheaper, but more importantly they are lighter which is important as I plan on travelling light.

The question is, "will hostels mind me sticking BUG fridge magnets to fridges and lockers as I visit the hostels to review them for the BUG website?" They will be small, business card size, fridge magnets with the bug.co.uk URL and a short blurb about our site.

Greetings all.

Anyone have any ideas about budget stickers. Until now, I've found Vistaprint to be an excellent choice for most of our marketing needs - they're cheap and also offer international shipping. Unfortunately, Vistaprint don't do stickers and so ideally I'm looking for an online printer that will simply churn out the design I want and ship it out to various locations in South America.

Any ideas?

What steps do you take to get listed in the print guidebooks like Lonely Planet and Let's Go? Or do you just wait for the guidebook writers to visit?

Any suggestions for travel guides to get listed in?

What are the major travel guides in different languages? (e.g., German, Korean, Spanish, French, Chinese)

Hi,

Anyone ever hear of overflow control? Airlines do it. Airlines direct customers to other airlines when they overbook. Independant hostels may do the same. Yes, all hostels in the area are your competition. Its not a bad thing though. Swap information with them. Tell them that you will direct guests over to them if overbooking or fully booking happens. Ask them to do the same for you. This way its a win / win / win situation for the guest, your competition and yourself.

Please remember to seperate the term COMPETITION and ENEMY. They are different. You can still work together with the competition. You cant work together with the enemy.

Do people have systems for sending out hostel rack flyers?

What I usually do is to track visitors to the Web site with a Web stats program like Google Analytics. That gives an idea of where people are located when they search for hostels in your area. You can then target your rack flyer mailing at specific cities where people are searching for your hostel.

Here is a sample screenshot from Google Analytics:

Here are the steps that I use:

• Install the free Google Analytics on your hostel's Web site
• Let Google Analytics gather data for at least a month or two
• Use the visitor geo tracking to find a list of cities where people are researching your hostel (visiting your Web site)
• Use a hostel directory like Hostelz.com to find the addresses of hostels in those cities where people are researching your hostel
• Mail your hostel's rack flyers to hostels in those cities

This systematic method gives a more precise measurement than just guessing where to send your rack flyers.

WOW .. I have tried just about everything. Seems the best is to have a good rack card. does not have to be professional, you want to get your name out there at a resonable cost and a wide distribution. You can send the cards to other hostels. You can drop them off at the chamber of commerce and visitor welcome centers. Bus and train terminals. anywhere a traveller might have aminute to check them out. In this resort area I have even placed them or cars parked in the ski areas parking lot .. I was specifically targeting groups from out of state so did not post on every car, just the out of state vans with mega ski racks. You can put them in display racks at the local restaurants and businesses sometimes. Anywhere your potential guests would see them.
I advertise in the Hostel Handbook. Seems to get some good distribution, and has a web site to boot. And I get a number of handbooks as part of the deal. Then I found a couple web sites that list places to get free information. So I offer these catalogues just for the postage as a promo and stick one of my rack cards inside. never know where your customers will come from. But I am still getting requests from people that hit these web sites and are requesting the book .. from an ad I posted about 15 years ago ...