How Zostel scaled India’s largest hostel chain onto one platform

Customer Profile

Zostel, India’s first and largest hostel chain, provides backpackers with safe, hygienic, relaxed, and affordable accommodation. With the increased popularity of backpacking in India, Zostel has seen consistent growth in the number of guests and aims to expand its business globally.

Zostel offers facilities such as 24-hour reception, breakfast, free Wi-Fi, parking space, air conditioning, a common hangout area, a restaurant/cafe, in-house activities, a swimming pool, and much more.

Challenge

When Zostel began operations, it managed bookings manually and maintained records in Excel sheets, which led to errors, overall inefficiency, and a subpar customer experience. Furthermore, this style of operation was not sustainable as Zostel started to receive more guests. Therefore, in order to prevent errors, manage day-to-day operations smoothly, provide a superior guest experience, and maximize business performance, Zostel needed sophisticated and tailored hospitality management technology that would effectively strengthen its weak points.

Solution

Zostel was in need of a comprehensive solution that would not only handle all aspects of operations and inventory distribution but also be configured to accommodate the unique needs of hostels, such as supplying beds instead of rooms. Yanolja Cloud’s hospitality management solutions subsidiary provided a tailored and integrated package of AWS-powered solutions, including a property management system, channel management system, internet booking engine, and restaurant POS system, that addressed all of Zostel’s needs.

Unlike the standalone products of many hospitality management solutions providers, YCS’s integrated package economically resolved all of Zostel’s challenges at once. AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3, and Amazon ElastiCache provided YCS with scalable architecture, uninterrupted services, secure and efficient data storage, and a multilingual application to deliver a top-notch experience for Zostel.

Result

YCS’s cloud-based property management system allowed Zostel to manage and track daily operations such as booking and inventory status, incomplete maintenance or housekeeping tasks, and guest arrivals and departures from anywhere at any time without paying for additional software licenses, ultimately allowing Zostel to utilize time and resources optimally.

Additionally, daily reports generated by the property management system provided data and insights to help Zostel make informed business decisions to maximize revenue.

By using YCS’s channel management system, Zostel achieved greater connectivity to online distribution channels and was capable of updating available inventory and rates while ensuring rate parity across all connected channels from a single platform. Moreover, because the channel management system constantly monitors occupancy rates on all connected channels, it optimized Zostel’s inventory allocation in real time to eliminate underbookings and overbookings and boost revenue.

While connectivity to online distribution channels is necessary for accommodation providers, it is also essential to generate direct bookings to increase profit. With YCS’s internet booking engine, Zostel created a booking platform on its website, which led to an increase in direct revenue and a decrease in commissions paid to online travel agencies.

The integration of these solutions allowed Zostel to operate these systems simultaneously with ease and further automate processes related to reservation management and inventory distribution, thereby maximizing revenue and operational efficiency while reducing costs.