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Hostelworld Has Ambitions to Complement Bookings With a Sense of Community

Patrick Whyte

Photo Credit: Actor Charlie Sheen appears in one of Hostelworld's commercials. The company wants to make itself indispensable to its users when they are traveling. Hostelworld Group

Skift Take

Now that Hostelworld has largely finished integrating Hostelbookers, it can turn its attention to developing features that would make it more relevant to users during their travels. None of the initiatives are exactly game-changing, but what the company is hoping is that it will make travelers more likely to click on its app rather than that of a competitor.

Budget accommodation specialist Hostelworld Group doesn’t just want to be an online travel agent. Like Airbnb and social networks, Hostelworld is doubling down on building a sense of community among its customers. Along these lines, the company is developing a series of tools that show how it is trying to differentiate its offering to keep it ahead of others in the hostel market. Last year, Hostelworld partnered with Trip.com for its MyTrips local recommendation platform and the product has now been expanded to include a noticeboard function, which allows users to find out what is going on at places they are staying. More recently it added Speak the World, which offers a translation service powered by Google. “We have launched a number of features that are partly related to building the community, partly related to differentiating our offering, because we'

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