Where to market your hostel

[Hostels]

Backpackers are increasingly turning to the Internet for their travel information. The Internet can be the main source of bookings for a hostel in a popular location.

What are some effective ways to use the Internet to market a hostel?

A few ideas to start:

• Hostel booking engines such as WRI (Hostelworld), Hostelbookers, Hostelsclub, and other hostel booking engines (which will be covered in detail here: http://www.hostelmanagement.com/sections/marketing/booking-services)
• Building an effective web site (which will also be covered in more depth here: http://www.hostelmanagement.com/sections/marketing/web-sites)
• Search engine optimization: making sure that backpackers can find your web site when they search for it in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This reduces the booking commisions of up to 10% that have to be paid to affiliate booking companies.

Other ideas? Comments? Post below.

[thlodge]

I have spent many hours sitting on the computer and registering for free listings on hostel sites. Damn ther are a bunch of them now. We are active on hostelworld. They have a booking engine that is used by other web sites. there is access to the back room so you control your availability. I list only two of my 3 rooms so I always have room for walk-ins.
Creating a webpage is not rocket science. All that is needed is to be familliar with the html key words and techniques that create the internet ready page. We are on AOL because that was what was available in 1983 and it is self loaded so I have daily control of the pages and unlimited changes that I do myself. AOL also had pages that were a tutorial and described all the stepe necessary to key up a web page. how to make jumps to other pages, links to email, bold, italic, change the type size and style. Do you that you can see all this stuff if you right click on a web page and the select "view source" ?

If anyone wishes to give a shot at creating their own web page, check out mine at members.aol.com/thlodge then give me a shout ... thlodge (at) aol . com

[thlodge]

to the forum manager ... have you listed this site on the other hostel oriented web sites?? .. maybe they would swap links, maybe a free listing of some sort.

[thlodge]

To find the sites and get listed for free (don't know if it is as easy now but we are listed on 40 something pages that we do not pay for) I googled the word "hostel" and started hitting all the web sites that turned up. Looking for a free listing posssibility. also advertise in the Hostel Handbook which has a web version. Also have gotten free listings on some Skiing web pages , thats the tourist attraction here.
hostelbookers , hosteltraveler , and hostelworld seem to be the major booking type web sites now, they are duplicated in many other languages and the initial listing and booking opportunities are offered thru affiliated sites which gives a lot of exposure ..

[thlodge]

I see your copy of the story about hostelworld . they are trippiong on their own inbred design flaws of their booking engine. on the lead in hostel locator , using us as an example, you need to know that "ludlow" is in the US and that it is in "Vermont", in order to find us . If you do not know what you are looking for and not familiar with a town name .. you are not going to find a local hostel on their web page. Yes Paris, Boston, Chicago probably do not need more description, but there are a lot of Ludlow's world wide ... If they would get it together in their locator they might have a good overall system

But they are not alone .. other sites have the same ambiguity ... seem almost that the design is coppied from some original source ...

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by thlodge

to the forum manager ... have you listed this site on the other hostel oriented web sites?? .. maybe they would swap links, maybe a free listing of some sort.

I have some ads running for this site, but it's new so I haven't had much time for that part yet. I should get started on that soon

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by thlodge

... on the lead in hostel locator , using us as an example, you need to know that "ludlow" is in the US and that it is in "Vermont", in order to find us . If you do not know what you are looking for and not familiar with a town name .. you are not going to find a local hostel on their web page. Yes Paris, Boston, Chicago probably do not need more description, but there are a lot of Ludlow's world wide ... If they would get it together in their locator they might have a good overall system

I think that Hostelworld is geared towards the big cities. They optimize their sites for keywords like "new york hostels", "london hostels", "dublin hostels". That is where most of their commission money comes from. The "search" feature on their web site also could use some improvement.

[dalma]

Hi everyone

I hope you dont think i am intruding here as i am not a hostel owner but i work for a internet software company and was wondering if i could pick your brains?

I am researching what motivates hostel owners and managers in terms of selling bed nights over the internet in the hopes of improving the products, our service and communications.

I am new to working in this industry and only have the experience from a backpackers view and would really like to discuss...............

What makes a hostel list on the internet these days?

What do websites offer to make you list your property with them?

What do you think isn't being offered by these companies?

Do you think the technology is moving faster than the industry?

Thanks and i look forward to your replies....

[thlodge]

What makes a hostel list on the internet these days?
more exposure = more inquiries = more reservations

What do websites offer to make you list your property with them?
Free listings, online reservations, multiple web presence (more than
one affiliated site)

What do you think isn't being offered by these companies?
effective search engines to find hostels by location

Do you think the technology is moving faster than the industry?


_________________________

Ok, I will babble on a bit from my experience about what I would like in a site.

The hostels should be searchable by country, region, state because that is how the traveller looks for a place to stay. Some of the sites out there now list locate the hostels by name or town. Do you know how many states, or countries have a town named "Ludlow"?? Maybe this works for New York, Boston, or Naples, but does not work for travelers wanting to find a hostel in an area where they do not know the names of the towns.

The best sites for me are the free listings. After all, running a hostel is a low budget deal. I do not mind the lister having a percentage of any booking fees. But a lot of sites want to charge for a listing, and a web page , and whatever. There are just too many sites that will post a free listing, it is not a good deal to have to pay for it. ha ha .. I just got an offer to have a company re-design my site for about $2000.00 .. My self designed AOL pages seem to get the info to the traveller just fine. The idea is to be listed wherever you can, so the traveller can find you.

Any site that has a booking engine must be reliable. It must be able to be easily managed by the hostel owner. I just signed up and set my availability on one this month and I got a request for a day that I posted as no availability. Not reliable. If a web page type listing is offered, it must be able to be revised by the hostel ownere at any time, free of charge.

I have been working the internet trying to promote my hostel and hostelling in general since 1985. The internet is slowly catching up to the needs of the hostel owner. A little fine tuning by those that wish to direct travellers to us, and we will be in great shape.
The first efforts to get listings were very tedius. Just finding other sites was a challenge. I spent many, many hours puting words in 'google' to find usefull sites on which I might be able to list my web pages. I designed web pages that fit the web sites so that they would list it. Some more general travelk sites would not list an individual hostel, but would list a page of 'Ski Hostels' or 'Vermont Hostels'.

The listing web site must make the effort to be found by the majority of the usual search engines. The web site should come up in the first two pages wheever a traveller googles "hostel", "lodging", "budget", etc ... well all the words that a traveller would use to find the accommodation that would fit their need ..

well thats probably enough babble for now .. good luck ... Rich

[Hostels]

Originally Posted by dalma

What makes a hostel list on the internet these days?

What do websites offer to make you list your property with them?

Hostel owners are faced with so many different booking companies, it is hard to keep track of which beds are allocated to the different booking systems (hostelworld, hostelmania, hostelsclub, hostelbookers, hosteltimes, etc.). That is a challenge that front desks are faced with. In low season it doesn't matter, but in high season at a large hostel it can be confusing.

Hostelworld managed to dominate the online booking engine not by creating the ideal system, but by getting in early and by buying hostels.com. Their built-in search engine is especially weak. I think that hostelz.com does well because they have built a good system. Their 'search' feature works really well and although they are affiliates of an affiliate system, they have created enough value-added content that it is a genuinely useful site.