Some improvements for Hostels?

Post here you suggestions and wished features for hoteldruid development.

Moderator: marco

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Kris
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2020 12:11 am

Some improvements for Hostels?

Post by Kris »

Hello, I am new here. Really like the open source nature of this project!

Anyways, it seems there could be some smaller improvements to make it more attractive to Hostels specifically. They are usually a low margin business of open minded young(er) entrepreneurs so HotelDruid could be a very interesting option.

Recently I came accross this interesting articlee:
https://thehostelhelper.com/hostel-statistics/

It is an obvious sales pitch for cloudbeds, but I think it shows that with some small improvements HotelDruid could become a good alternative.

Primarily it would be that Hostelworld would become a supported service for the channel manager. They support XML two way communication, so it should not be too different from the already natively supported ones like booking.com

Furthermore better support and clearer pricing for individual beds in the hosted version of HotelDruid would be cool.

Last but not least, I noticed that there is a Github repo, but it is not actively used for development: https://github.com/digital-druid/hoteldruid
So if you would like to cater to external contributions (for example a modernized interface using a CSS framework like Bulma) it would be really helpful if a more open development style with a public git repo could be established.

Thanks a lot!
marco
Posts: 1332
Joined: Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:00 pm
Location: Roma, Italia

Re: Some improvements for Hostels?

Post by marco »

Hello Kris,
I agree that hostels are an interesting market for hoteldruid and some improvements have been made for them in the recent past, mainly the possibility to rent all beds in a room at once (room rate) with the assignment rule 2 with multiple rooms/beds.

Currently I have no plans to add new channels, but hostelworld would be one of the top in the list (the first being airbnb but they don't seem to accept new partners now). Anyway you can connect to hostelworld, as any other channel, through octorate.

The beds (single occupancy units) have a discounted price on the digitaldruid.net hosting, you can calculate their prices by proceeding with the activation, before the paypal payment. I'll try to add an option to calculate the price with beds on the first page.

Currently the code is in Italian and external contributions are not being accepted. Also consider that with management software each one wants to add his own small feature, not willing to make 50-80% more work to make it compatible with the rest of users (compatibility with other features, configuration options, privileges, etc.), that's why I think open source management software is not so popular. Nonetheless a translation in English is planned for version 4.0 (years away) and after that the development could be moved to an open repository.

Regards,
Marco
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Kris
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2020 12:11 am

Re: Some improvements for Hostels?

Post by Kris »

Thanks for the reply. A pity that you are not open to external contributions yet.

Direct integration of Hostelworld would be really apprechated as just paying Octorate for that seems not very efficient. Is there anything we could do to make you consider implementing it in the near future?
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