The Indie Travel Podcast

Craig talks about six different hostel booking sites, doing a full review of five of them: gomio, HI hostels, hostelz, hostelworld and hostelbookers. He looks at booking features, hostel listings and other services provided by the sites. Unfortunately Linda’s lost her voice, so it’s all Craig this week.

Subscribe to the podcast for full details, or check out the conclusions below.

GOMIO:
Conclusion: Although we’ve been travelling primarily in Europe — gomio’s niche market — they’ve pretty much fallen off of our radar. They might suit you perfectly, but we’re happy without them.

HI HOSTELS
Conclusion: If you can’t find accommodation using a more general hostel booking site then check here just in case you find something that isn’t available online.

HOSTELZ
Conclusion: We really like their reviews section and refer to it if a place looks at all suspect. A hostel’s cost is very important to us, so the inability to see live prices from the start seems to slow down the research process too much.

ASIDE: TFT HOSTELS
Provides a comparison of listings for several major booking sites. Kind of like skyscanner for hostels.

HOSTELWORLD
Conclusion: I love the added value that hostelworld provides in terms of media but as an end user I don’t like the booking fee or membership system. I thought Paypal would be great for me, since I use Paypal quite a lot but the double validation is a huge waste of time. Thanks to a free gold card, over the last 12 months we’ve used hostelworld for about half of our bookings.

HOSTELBOOKERS
Conclusion: Great search results and no booking fee make hostelbookers a site we return to. We’ve used them for about 50% of our bookings over the last year.

Last year we announced our favourite site was hostelbookers, but late in 2007 and through the beginning of 2008 we found ourselves using hostelworld more and more. This will probably decrease again when our complementary gold card expires.

New feed options

We now offer four ‘flavours’ of the Indie Travel Podcast. Choose your favourite feed from the site’s sidebar.

• RSS: everything we publish
• Features: Travel talks video, midweek article and Friday show
• Video: Only the video episodes
• Articles: Only the articles

Our hosting fees are about to go up US$20/month. Please consider making a donation or doing your online shopping AFTER clicking through links on our site.

Affiliate of the week:

Poll of the month:

Photo thanks to Peter Gene

If you like this, please Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 and is a Accommodation, Podcast, Research, Reviews post. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “066 - Hostel Site Reviews 2008”

1. Nomadic Matt Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 6:14 pm

   Thanks for the link! I’ll check out that site. how did you get the hostel bookers affliate links?

   also, you invited me to stumble- I’m already on it!! just look for nomadic matt!

2. Craig Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 6:34 pm

   Hey Matt, good to hear from you again. I’ll root you out on SU and email you with the hostelbookers details.

3. Official TFTHostels Blog Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 9:21 pm

   [...] you do not know which hostel booking site to choose check out the podcast. Hostelmania and Hostelsclub are not mentioned so you could check them out by yourself, because [...]

4. Marco van de Kamp Says:
   July 21st, 2008 at 9:36 pm

   Some other sites I would suggest you to check out are:

   Hostelmania - New guys started in 2004, world wide bookings.

   Hostelsclub - If you visit Italy checking this site is a must, world wide bookings.

5. Chris Says:
   July 22nd, 2008 at 5:37 pm

   Hi Craig,
   I like your site very much, now there is a report on my blog about indietravelpodcast in german under http://www.hostelblog.de/hostelbuchungsplattformen-vergleich-bei-indietravelpodcastcom/

   Your recent “show” about the different hostel booking sites is really great to hear, keep it up.

   Kind regards from Berlin, Germany,

   Chris

6. Michael Peters Says:
   August 4th, 2008 at 1:44 am

   Good topic!

   I’ve been travelling in South America for 6 weeks and found this site:

   http://www.hosteltrail.com

   - and it’s one of the only decent sources I’ve found for Colombia and Venezuela.

   Enjoy.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail

The Indie Travel Podcast uses Thank Me Later

When you leave a comment, your email address will be added to our email newsletter. No spam, never sold. If you don't want to be added, please say. Images are powered by Gravatar - Get your own.