All this celebrating Queen Elizabeth, the sunshine and the Olympic torch relay has got me pretty nostalgic for the old ways. Which gets me to thinking about how hostels used to be when I was growing up. Thankfully they have moved on a lot since those days but I look back with fondness at a few eccentric and questionable features of hostel life: Top of the list has to be Sheet Sleeping Bags. When pronounced with a certain foreign accent the first...

Getting guests to use your hostel as a base is going to be a big part of your campaign to increase occupancy and profit. They may have only planned to stay one night but you are going to make it irresistible to stay more and in fact they should want to never leave. Have this as an objective: Try to get a person who has checked in for one night to come down 10 minutes later and ask if you have vacancies tomorrow night. Then you know you are on...

I’m sitting here on this Good Friday morning looking at my little baby boy, who will be 1 year old on Sunday. As he crawls across the floor I am reminded of my first holiday away from parents – using a bicycle and YHA hostels as my means to escape. There was no internet back then. I had a hostel handbook, which came in the post with my YHA membership card. In the back of the handbook were slips of paper which I filled in obediently,...

“Oh shit – it is Easter and we are nowhere near ready.” The decorating isn’t anywhere near finished, the new staff don’t know anything and there isn’t time to train them (what operations manual?) Sound familiar? Read on! What was worse: we had no beds. We’d taken all the old, metal bunks down in readiness but the delivery of brand new wooden bunks had somehow gone to Northumberland instead of North Wales...

Welcome to the Hostel Hub website. Launched 31st March 2012, based on over 20 years experience working with hostels in rural communities. I’m going to explain a bit about what we do and what the website is doing. This Blog is going to be the more personal, behind the scenes part where I’ll try to post interesting articles about my hostel experiences, and thoughts about where hostels are and where they could be. The Tips part of the...