What do you want to experience when you stay at a hostel?
This is a great question I would break this into multiple components:
When you arrive, you are exhausted usually because you have been traveling and you’re probably hangover as well if you have stayed at a hostel the night before, so I want to take a nap on a good bed in a place that is relatively quiet and clean.
I want a variety of events that I can sign up to and I want a very vibrant social life at night. I want to meet people from all around the world. It will be great to have some okay food, that it doesn’t happen often at the hostels. Then I want some local expertise so that I can go and talk to an employee at the hostel if I didn’t have time to research.
And then I want to wake up and I find a social environment. There are people young people who want to just stay in a city for three months pretty much on a volunteer internship contract, sleep and eat and drink for free, working six days a week, and their primary job is to activate the social environment. I want that when I stay at a hostel.
What is your vision for the hostel industry?
Currently, most hostels around the world are run by couples or families because they usually backpacked themselves and they started a hostel with their blood, sweat and tears and made something cool!
But I believe that there can be international companies which maintain the authenticity of a family-owned hostel but owning chains. Here at CATS we are trying to build around thirty-five hostels around Europe in the next five years. With globalization as a trend, and rising prosperity around the world, more and more people have the ability to cross borders and travel internationally, especially people from developing economies like India. So, I believe the hostel industry will scale commensurably with these multiple trends supporting it.
What a good hostel should have?
I’m really passionate about events and I think that a good hostel company should also be an event company, that is something we are going to work on with CATS. I think hostels can take over a lot more what guests want out of their experience from a city. Right now we only really provide some parties and a good place to sleep, but there is so much more and hostels are the base for a traveler to explore a city, so we should expand out from there and derive more value for them!