The Coronavirus has turned the travel industry upside down and many hostels are simply in survival mode. By now you’ve likely had to make extreme measures to ensure the long-term survival of your hostel like renegotiating the terms of your lease or laying off your staff. Now that the initial shock has passed but we are a long way from a return to normalcy, here are a handful of suggestions for improving your hostel’s chances of survival.

How often do hostel owners share their profits with the receptionists? Definitely not often but, as you will learn today, the answer is not, “never.” Enter The Crash Pad Hostel in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Have you heard of Tennessee? When you think about The Crash Pad, put away all your stereotypes of “The South” in America.

The Crash Pad advertises itself as “an uncommon hostel.” From the guest perspective this is certainly true. The Crash Pad is a certified LEED Platinum, which means it uses fewer resources, reduces waste and negative environmental impacts, and was constructed to maximize health and productivity. No other hostel currently holds this certification.

Besides their incredibly cool building, step behind the reception desk and let’s talk about what really makes The Crash Pad one-of-a-kind. It’s called, “Open Book Management.”

The Economic Policy Institute published an in-depth report on Airbnb’s costs and benefits to society. It’s full of empirical research and meaningful conclusions on how everyone from residents, to housekeepers, to local governments is affected by the rise of Short Term Rentals (or Airbnbs as they're mostly known). This article covers the report and how its findings specifically relate to hostels. 

Last month Hostelworld released its Evolution of the Hostel Traveler report. We learned some valuable insights into how present and future generations of travelers book hostels. Let's discuss how these behaviors can affect your pricing strategy.

Do you compete with other hostels in your area? If so, you’re probably checking regularly to see how much the competition is charging. If you don’t monitor your competition’s prices carefully, you’re either missing out on extra profit by making your beds too cheap or missing out on bed nights by making them too expensive. 49% of Generation Z backpackers reference price as what will attract them to stay at a hostel. The problem is, how the prices change is only half the picture. When the prices change is important too.

Reputation is everything; and in a technologically inclined era, your online presence matters a lot. Scrolling through social media is now part of everyday life, and travelers use it to read reviews and to find out information on the places they will be visiting. It is also one of the best ways that a hostel can connect with potential and current guests to ensure an engaging, interesting and memorable experience. Here are a few ways to help you get started. 

In 2007, we took over a horribly run-down property and began the slow process of converting it into 11th Avenue Hostel. During those 12 years, we experienced the repercussions of cruel reviews, low-quality photos, and unhappy guests due to misleading information or the lack of understanding of what a hostel is.

Thankfully, the result of these mishaps allowed us to become knowledgeable about improving and maintaining our online reputation, rolling with the punches, and making sure our business shone online.

Below, we’ll share some tried and true techniques to help hostels maintain their online reputation in an increasingly competitive digital world.

We’ve covered before how important it is for your hostel to have a revenue management strategy. One of the reasons why making decisions about your yield strategy feels complicated and scary is because you normally don’t get to see how other hostels in town are performing. Hostels have to make a decision based upon their own occupancy, their own prices, and maybe their competitors’ prices, without knowing how full everyone else is. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

STR has been collecting benchmarking data on the hotel industry for over fifty years, and now they’re starting to work with hostels too. I spoke to Patrick Mayock from STR about their new hostel benchmarking programs and what they mean for the hostel industry. 

Once when I was working with a small hostel the owner showed me their housekeeping procedures. When it was time to mop the floors, he told me they poured a splash of cleaning chemicals  into the bucket. “Okay, but how much is a splash?” I asked. He looked back at me bewildered, and assured me that common sense applied; a splash means a splash. A few days later a volunteer was asked to re-mop the floor because he had used too much product, leaving a soapy, streaky residue all over the bathrooms.

When the people that power a hostel have to use their discretion, nothing can be planned for and anticipated because each day things will be done differently. One week the mop bucket will be too soapy and the next week too diluted. If your hostel depends on having the owner or a superstar manager there to keep the hostel on track, do you really own a hostel or do you own a job running a hostel? Having systems to run your hostel for you are essential. They allow your hostel to provide a consistent, quality guest experience that’s powered by the systems you have in place, not the people that happen to be operating them.

Did you know that there is a publicly traded hostel company? That’s right: there is a hostel that you can buy and sell on the London Stock Exchange! This hostel company is Safestay, one of Europe’s fastest growing hostel companies.

Besides the fact that it’s kind of cool you can buy hostel stock, being a public company means we get a glimpse into Safestay’s inner workings; a peek under the hood that you don’t normally get with other big hostel chains. This week Safestay made an announcement on its performance in 2018. Let’s take a look and see what we can learn, not only about Safestay, but what we can apply to our own hostels.

Last week I had the privilege of presenting at the American Hostel Conference. My talk was on trends in the economy, society, and the travel industry, and how they will affect hostels in 2019. Just as I hope the hostel operators in attendance learned from my presentation, I learned so much from the other presenters and attendees of the conference. We'll cover some of the topics from presentations in the coming weeks, but today let's recap what we can learn from the conference overall.