More Hostel World praise
When we developed the functionality to take Hostel World reviews and ratings and display them on the Base website I believed we were working with Hostel World (rather than against them) - after all Base hostels used the Hostel World property management system - and as I said earlier today, we were in effect announcing the importance of Hostel World content.
Ironically, it was over a year ago that I first saw the aggregating functionality that the Charts property management system was promoting for populating the Hostel World inbox with availability from Charts and subsequently retrieving bookings into the property management system. It was obvious to me at the time that this would be unacceptable to Hostel World. Firstly, there is the case of controlling the hits on their server. But secondly, it is the case of controlling the data.
Hostel World are happy to share their technology (you can insert their booking engine into your website very easily) and their moves to RSS feed the reviews and ratings is evidence of their Web 2.0 attitude to sharing data within the realms of sensibility. But their wish to restrict the access to availability (their main asset) is understandably essential.
Firstly, they are in the business of providing property management systems (Backpack for Windows) and to allow other property management systems access to their online availability database is in effect cutting their own market. But the second and more understandable reason was made clear to me by Tom Kennedy in a brief discussion outside the Sheraton Hotel in Toronto in 2005. When I asked Tom what the chance of accessing the Hostel World database both for populating and getting availability for the TravelFAT system he said slim. He explained that the risk for Hostel World if everyone had access to availability would be an erosion of prices - sites cutting commissions or hostels putting lower prices on certain sites. The net effect a lower yield for everyone - obvious.
The screen scraping method that Charts was using for populating the Hostel World inbox with availability and retrieving bookings was only a short step for someone to develop a booking engine using the Hostel World availability but not their payments engine - in effect side stepping Hostel World and keeping the money for themselves.
So it came as no surprise recently that Hostel World has added a visual randomly generated code that has to be entered to their login screen to stop such practices. It is a pity for all the hostels that purchased Charts on this premise. Nonetheless, let us hope that at sometime in the near future Hostel World considers publishing their APIs for how other property management systems might send availability to, and retrieve bookings from, the Hostel World database - ignoring of course their business model of distributing their own property management system (sic).
Tags: Base Backpackers, Hostel World, Industry