Hostels Attract Young, Mobile Travellers

When some peo­ple think of hos­tels, they imag­ine cheap, spar­tan lodg­ings. But many of today’s hos­tels offer ameni­ties rivalling any hotel. The excel­lent val­ue, com­fort­able accom­mo­da­tions, and oppor­tu­ni­ty to make new friends are rea­sons why many pas­sion­ate trav­ellers are attract­ed to hostels.

Unlike hotels, hos­tels tend to cater to a young, mobile crowd. While tra­di­tion­al hotels receive about 40% of their book­ings online, that num­ber jumps to 70% for hos­tels. Hostel­world under­stands the needs of the hos­tel audi­ence. The com­pa­ny has grown into a lead­ing book­ing plat­form by spe­cial­iz­ing in world­wide hos­tel offer­ings through its web­site and apps.

Hos­tel cus­tomers are more like­ly to con­sume infor­ma­tion dig­i­tal­ly, so they’re less affect­ed by tra­di­tion­al print, radio, and tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing. For Hostel­world, this means that the most effec­tive ads come from per­son­al­ized expe­ri­ences on dig­i­tal channels.

With Adobe Expe­ri­ence Cloud, Hostel­world has cre­at­ed a sol­id foun­da­tion for next-gen­er­a­tion dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, part of Adobe Ana­lyt­ics Cloud, is the foun­da­tion of the dig­i­tal strat­e­gy. By learn­ing more about who its cus­tomers are, where they come from, and how they use the web­site and apps, Hostel­world can learn how to more effec­tive­ly mar­ket to audi­ences. Feed­ing this data into Adobe Media Opti­miz­er, part of Adobe Adver­tis­ing Cloud, allows mar­keters to opti­mize bids on effec­tive search terms and reduce the cost of book­ings by 20%.

Using audi­ences cre­at­ed through Adobe Ana­lyt­ics, Hostel­world can also improve the effec­tive­ness of its cross-chan­nel adver­tis­ing cam­paigns by adding per­son­al­ized and tar­get­ed mes­sag­ing. With Adobe Cam­paign, part of Adobe Mar­ket­ing Cloud, Hostel­world now deliv­ers more than one bil­lion emails annu­al­ly. But since the tar­get­ed emails are only sent to cus­tomers who will appre­ci­ate the infor­ma­tion, the unsub­scribe rates have actu­al­ly gone down while the click-through rates have gone up.

“The num­bers speak for them­selves. Adobe has had a tremen­dous impact on our dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy,” says Otto Rosen­berg­er, CMO of Hostel­world Group. “We’ll nev­er stop improv­ing the cus­tomer jour­ney, and Adobe will con­tin­ue to help us find our way.”

Read the full case study here.