Web Reservations International (Hostelworld, Hostels.com) Up for Sale

[livaus]

Originally Posted by Hostels

The hostels have to pay taxes on the agent's income?

Do you have any links about those topics?

Well, in Europe we will have to pay VAT, but it will be a reverse charge so it won;t affect us that much. More paperwork though

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by HostelOffice

I am in Seattle now...

I was just there last week. Great city

[HostelOffice]

Priceline own Booking.com that have a more intelligent setup than any Hostel agent site. So if Priceline buy Hostelworld I think we can be happy. Especially if they reduce their current 12% commission down for hostels.

Booking.com have agents in each region and not in a far off land. Their agents will work with you to tweak your hostel setup and their rating system is very special. Their billing is based on trust.

Overall Booking.com understand that hostels are their customer and they are very helpful. Their system enables a hostel to do more things to gain more bookings as it does not promote mostly the lowest price.

As a Property Management supplier.
Our integration with them has stopped many hostels from being on the continuing downward price per bed spiral. They are a valuable agent for hostels.

[aboriginalhostel]

Originally Posted by HostelOffice

Our integration with them has stopped many hostels from being on the continuing downward price per bed spiral. They are a valuable agent for hostels.

IMHO booking.com is indeed a valuable agent for hostels but rather on selling private rooms than dorms.
Would you say the same for dorm beds as well? Do you have any public statistics available?
(I don't have experience on this BE, we only registered ourselves two weeks ago)

[HostelOffice]

No not so much with dorm beds. When Hostels integrate with Booking.com they tend to increase the price of their dorm beds back to a fair price because they are preferring to sell dorm rooms as private twins, private triples and private quads.

Hostels can sell a private quad on Booking.com for the same price they would sell 6 dorm beds on a hostel site.

If you write your text correctly you get guests from Booking.com that are happy about the low price when in fact you are getting a higher price than you usually get.

So dorm beds are not the big sellers on Booking.com.

You do get a lot of returning customers from Booking.com as the people that use it can be business folk looking for a low priced solution to save spending all their accommodation per diem on a hotel. And of course they really like the activity with guests at the hostel as oppossed to being locked in a hotel room in a city where they do not know anyone.

But you have to get your descriptive text and setup correct otherwise you will get a lot of angry guests

No public stats mate as we learn from trialing at our test hostels before we roll it out to our current and new users. We see the trends, errors, and wins.

[Irishdon]

The idea of Booking.com getting into the hostel market isn't bad.

The company seems professional enough to understand the market and know how to sell and promote different accommodation types, including dorm rooms.

Out of all the online websites currently operating I would probably have more faith in their abilities than in some of their competitors!

[Hostels]

Hostelworld has been sold:
WRI (Hostelworld) Sold to Hellman and Friedman

[santa klaus]

Shit, I just started to save some money for the purchase. I would have had the 250 millions in 13765 years. Can´t they wait?

[Ronny@SleepyLion]

...so it´s not priceline as favoured, but Hellman & Friedman... I guess there won´t be any change in the business model...Hellman (and even Friedman) are probably more interested in only collecting the profit in time ...good luck, guys!

[santa klaus]

Look at page 1, I said "I think HW would be a good acquisition for a complete newcomer to the business". I´m glad it´s not one of the hotel booking sites. They would only think they have a clue about what HW does and should do and start to mess it up.

There´s nothing wrong with an owner who just wants to collect the profits in time, but otherwise lets the management do what they know better than themselves.