Samesun Hostels

Samesun Hostels have been offering awesome accommodation for backpackers and travelers across Canada and the US for the last almost thirty years. They currently operate over ten properties – from large cities such as Los Angeles and Vancouver to smaller mountain properties such as Banff.

We spoke to Director Stephen De Hertogh about how they have transformed things.

Old-School Frustrations

"We were manually changing our pricing every day – it was a lot of work and not very accurate. So switching to automated pricing became a key goal of ours. During the pandemic, we doubled the number of hostels we ran and the old manual way was not something we could scale with our growth.

"We were recommended FLYR for Hospitality by several hostel chains as it was 'hostel' friendly with the ability to handle a more complex inventory mix. Other revenue management systems force you to sell everything as a 'room', which is far from ideal.

"I come from an economics background and believe firmly in the laws of supply and demand. It really doesn't matter what your compset is doing and we should simply be looking at supply and demand. It's what I really like about the pricing algorithm – it's all about demand."

Instant Results

"As we roll out across our properties, we are gradually switching on automated pricing. January and February tend to be our lowest demand months and this year all of our properties reduced revenue in January…except one! January at our property in San Francisco was the best month in some time…and it's no coincidence that it was the first pilot property to have automation up and running!

"We also want our GMs to be able to focus on day-to-day operations and not on pricing. We have over ten properties and now the system allows us to have just one person looking after the pricing of all of them. It has helped increase our revenue, which is awesome, but we are also getting a lot of efficiency savings at the same time."

Commercial Intelligence

"Another big factor for our choice was the business intelligence tool. I used to spend at least three or four hours a week doing analytics. With analytics you put in the effort once to build your dashboards and reports and then everything is automated from then on.

"Beyond saving time, analytics is fundamental to our strategic decision making. We're particularly keen to look at 'revenue per square foot' at our properties and to spot yearly trends. From that we can predict when we should switch dorms to private rooms and vice versa.

"For example, on a seasonal basis we can see that we are going to get more backpackers during the summer months so we can pivot to 6-bed and 8-bed dorms. While during the shoulder period we can see how many more private rooms we may need. Right now we are 50% privates vs dorms. That used to be 10%."