Blog \ Our take on hostel management
Get our latest content by email
How Do I promote My Hostel?
You've opened the doors to your hostel! Now, how will you get travellers to come?
Tim Zenderman
Founder & Former CEO
Share post
If you read “So you want to open a new hostel?” we talked about writing a business plan for your hostel, and one of the key topics was promotion.
We all like promotions such as coupons for free ice cream and funny radio advertisements, but promotional tactics have evolved over the years. Plus, promoting your hostel can be quite challenging, since your target market might appear as large as “anyone who doesn’t live in this town.” How can you promote your hostel to the rest of the world in a cost effective manner?
So here's the point. Promotions are all about testing tactics, collecting data, measuring performance and learning from this process. The good news is that we collect data for you and help you organize it. Our team works hard to develop more analytics and dashboard tools, which will help you assess your hostel's operating performance and look at guest trends over time. This can help you judge the effectiveness of promotional campaigns.
For example, let’s say you run a promotional campaign targeting college students from Israel travelling to Argentina over the summer. Wouldn’t it be nice to display charts showing the demographic mix of guests during the summer for this year versus last year to see if there was a noticeable bump in guests from Israel and which booking channels they came from?
Looking at promotionals, I place them in two buckets. The first bucket I call “mandatory tactics” and the second is “discretionary tactics.” Having a website with lots of photos and working with OTAs are both mandatory tactics. Spending time and money on social media, SEO, SEM, online advertising, offline advertising, co-marketing partnerships and referral programs are all discretionary tactics. And by discretionary, we just mean that you have limited time and only so much money to allocate to promotions, so you have to test, collect data, measure performance, and continue to refine these tactics.
There are many factors that will determine which discretionary tactics you should emphasize. If you are already blessed with high occupancy rates, you don’t want to go overboard on promotional expenses just because you can. A marketing budget that is based on a percentage of sales revenue is too simplistic. If you have a new hostel, your occupancy rates may be lower and require you to invest more in building awareness. If your hostel has 300 beds versus 30 beds, scale will impact how much time and money you can budget as well. Your location is also very important. If you are a high profile hostel in a major tourist destination with a major airport, your promotional strategies will be different than a hostel in a small town that backpackers only reach by bus, rental car or hiking boots.
I’d like to talk to you about each mandatory and discretionary tactic in greater detail in future blog posts, and please share with us what you have found works well or doesn’t work for you. We here at BananaDesk believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, so the smarter we become as an industry, the more hostelling can grow for all of us. I also highly recommend that you join the forum discussions at HostelManagement.com. They maintain multiple online discussions about hostel marketing tactics, so join the discussion and learn from the experience of others!
Happy hostelling!
Photo by Campaign Creators at Unsplash
Disqus Recommendations
We were unable to load Disqus Recommendations. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting guide.
❮
- 7 years ago
- 2 comments
Oh, metrics... If you don't like numbers, chances are you steer far away from …
- 7 years ago
- 2 comments
Oh, métricas... Si no te gustan los números, probablemente te …
- 8 years ago
- 1 comment
First impressions are really important. Your website needs to blow it out of the …
- 8 years ago
- 3 comments
Si como muchos, caiste en la tentación de crear un Perfil de usuario en Facebook …
- 7 years ago
- 1 comment
By running the numbers and going through different scenarios, we can …
- 8 years ago
- 3 comments
This is a topic that I love to talk about! First, I'm passionate about the …
- 8 years ago
- 11 comments
If, like many, you fell into the temptation of creating a Facebook Profile instead …
- 8 years ago
- 5 comments
¡Este es un tema del que me encanta hablar! Primero, porque soy un apasionado …
❯
Disqus Comments
We were unable to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting guide.
What do you think?
2 Responses
Upvote
Funny
Love
Surprised
Angry
Sad
G
Start the discussion…
Comment
Log in with
or sign up with Disqus or pick a name
Disqus is a discussion network
- Don't be a jerk or do anything illegal. Everything is easier that way.
Read full terms and conditions
This comment platform is hosted by Disqus, Inc. I authorize Disqus and its affiliates to:
- Use, sell, and share my information to enable me to use its comment services and for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, including supplementing that information with other data about me, such as my browsing and location data.
- Contact me or enable others to contact me by email with offers for goods or services
- Process any sensitive personal information that I submit in a comment. See our Privacy Policy for more information
Acknowledge I am 18 or older
I'd rather post as a guest
Discussion Favorited!
Favoriting means this is a discussion worth sharing. It gets shared to your followers' Disqus feeds, and gives the creator kudos!
Tweet this discussion
- Share this discussion on Facebook
- Share this discussion via email
- Copy link to discussion
Be the first to comment.
live.rezync.com
live.rezync.com is blocked
This page has been blocked by an extension
- Try disabling your extensions.
ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
Reload
This page has been blocked by an extension
pippio.com
pippio.com is blocked
This page has been blocked by an extension
- Try disabling your extensions.
ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT
Reload
This page has been blocked by an extension
Subscribe to our Newsletter to get our latest content by email!
You can unsuscribe at any time.
Telegram Whatsapp LinkedIn Facebook Reddit Email
https://bananadesk.com/blog/how-do-i-promote-my-hostel
Copy link
Hostel managementmade simple.
Avoid overbookings. Synchronize your offer. Simplify your life.