Did you know?
Traditional hostel booking sites like Hostelworld and Booking.com do not list all hostels? They only list hostels that are willing to agree to their rules and pay them high commissions on the guests booked through their platforms. These rules and high commissions result in higher costs to the traveler. While this might be okay for hotels, most hostel guests are looking for the lowest prices so they can travel as long and as far as possible.
Many hostels have opted not to be listed on these sites resulting in incomplete information for travelers. Many of the hostels that choose to remain on the site raise
their prices to offset the cost of the high commissions, which means travelers booking on these sites need to pay more!
In addition, many of these sites hide the contact details of the hostel to the traveler. This means you can’t see the hostel website to get a feel for the “vibe” of the hostel. You sometimes can’t message the hostel in advance of your booking to ask questions or email the hostel after your stay. Many of these sites do whatever they can to interfere with the relationship and communication between the traveler and the hostel.
Why not just use Google to find hostels?
Even Google (and other search engines and websites) mix in results of hotels, B&Bs, etc with hostel listings. This makes it difficult for travelers to find hostels and only hostels because they have to sort through lots of non-hostel listings. Most hostel travelers are not simply looking for a cheap place to stay. They are looking for a vibrant travelers community that only hostels can provide.
Why we created OurHostels.com
Many travelers and hostel owners feel like our international hostel travel community is being taken over by these monopolistic corporations who are just fighting with each other to gain market share and raise the value of stock for their shareholders. We decided we were not going to take it anymore and therefore created “Our Own Hostel Website”.
OurHostels.com provides travelers with an easy way to find hostels (and only hostels) that currently are difficult to find on traditional booking sites like Hostelworld and Booking.com. The site is committed to enabling travelers to easily find and book hostels directly without booking fees or commissions.
How you can help
Our ultimate goal is to create the world’s most complete database of hostels. Since our small team can’t be everywhere in the world (although we would like to), we rely on travelers to tell us about hostels that are missing from our database. Use the “Submit Another Hostel” button and tell us about a hostel we have missed. Our editors will then research your hostel and add it to our database. If you have suggestions on how can improve a hostel listing, use the “Suggest Edits” button on the hostel listing. Together we can make OurHostels.com the best site for finding all the hostels.
Our plans for the future
If you are not excited yet, let us tell you about our plans for future features and improvements:
- Date filter search, based on hostels that have availability for your chosen dates
- Immediately direct book hostels at the lowest price without expensive booking fees or commissions
- Read and post reviews about hostels
- Post questions about hostels and answer questions about your favorite hostels for other travelers.