Worthwhile booking engines.

[Plakian]

Currently I am with HW, HB and GOMIO (because they deserve our support). Being a relatively small hostel and having to manage bookings and allocations manually I feel that these three are enough.

However, there are many other booking engines out there that are vying for our support. Are any of them worthwhile? I include amongst these TripAdvisor and StudentUniverse.

Your advice would be appreciated.

[Ronny@SleepyLion]

..we use hostelsclub.com as well...
It is pretty strong in the south european market...mainly used by customers from Spain or Italy...

[KevinM]

I have created an online petition against HostelsClub due to their theft of the HostelPower software. Please visit it and read the details: http://www.boycotthostelsclub.com

Thank you for your time,
Kevin

[crhostel]

I think it depends on your location. For us, hostelsclub is laughable. I think in the last four years we've gotten one booking from them. But we get a lot of business from HW and HB. Some smaller booking engines like minihostels.com are coming along as well. We use Gomio too, but don't see a lot of bookings from them.

[Tinker's Station]

kind of a random question, but do any of these booking utilities allow you to specify single-sex rooms?

[Canhostel]

Yup, they allow you to either break it down by sex or mixed dorm.

[KrazyBackofficeAnimal]

We (Plus Prague) are on HW, HB, LM and HC (because they are Italian ) when it comes to hostel. Hotel is being offered on Laterooms, LM, Orbitz and Rates to go.

However number one in terms of bookins is of course HW (surprise! )

[Tinker's Station]

another question is how much commission do these guys take? I believe we'll be getting most of our customers from car traffic because when the ski resorts are open we can get anywhere from hundreds to thousands of cars driving by. I don't want to have to use something that takes 10% right off the bat.

[Canhostel]

You can always put the minimum amount of beds available during the heavy season and then up the amount in slow periods. Although myself I prefer advance reservations versus just walk ins. Gives you more of an idea how much staff to put on.

Even if you are not open for a couple of months you can get onto HW and HB and put some available beds for later on. At least for future periods people will know that you exist.

[Tinker's Station]

Originally Posted by Canhostel

You can always put the minimum amount of beds available during the heavy season and then up the amount in slow periods. Although myself I prefer advance reservations versus just walk ins. Gives you more of an idea how much staff to put on.

Even if you are not open for a couple of months you can get onto HW and HB and put some available beds for later on. At least for future periods people will know that you exist.

Would we have to reserve those beds for HW only? I'm sure we won't be getting a ton of traffic from them because not a lot of Americans use HW (unless they are traveling to Europe) and I would hate to have to turn someone away because of the reserved beds.