I just read the hostelworld reviews of my hostel this morning. Saw the review from the guests we had a week ago. The ones who smoked inside the building and dropped ashes in the hall. The ones who made so much noise that the neighbors had to call the owner who called me. The ones who refused to leave when I told them that the best things they could do for the situation was go out to a bar for the rest of the evening. The ones who tried to intimidate my manager when I called him from his home to help me keep an eye on them. The only guests whose departure we’ve ever celebrated. Yeah those guys. Yeah, that review.
Sorry you didn’t like it when we told you that you had to follow our rules. Sorry that you didn’t quite understand when I said in plain English that this hostel is for sleeping and not partying. I know it’s horrible to show people some respect when you’re staying in their home. Sorry you didn’t like your hostel experience. Assholes.
I had this very conversation at work, with someone arguing the customer is always right and me saying uh-uh, no way, sometimes they’re unreasonable and expect things we are not able to deliver without a lot of manual work. I’m starting to love the phrase “Manage your customer’s expectations.”
The website has both a one to five ratings system and a comments entry. You can hide the comments entry but there’s nothing we can do about the poor ratings except hope that other guest give us good ratings to compensate.
If you’re hurting because of bad ratings, why not print up some little cards with the relevant site information and hand them out to happy guests, saying “Thanks so much for staying with us. If you don’t mind leaving comments about your stay and your feedback, I’d really appreciate it.”
Sounds like a hostile hostel. I would hope that enough positive reviews from other guests would help balance out one negative one, much like the feedback that is given on eBay. Anyone looking should be able to spot a rare bad comment and filter it out as an “outlier.”
Where are you located, by the way? I don’t know of many typical European-style youth hostels in the U.S., if there are any at all.
If it helps, I use the reviews at hostelworld and hostelz.com pretty regularly, and it’s usually easy to spot the ones that come from disgruntled party people with an oversized sense of entitlement. I take those with a grain of salt.
I’m actually located in Tallinn, Estonia. There are some hostels in the US, just not many. You can always check at hostels.com (independent hostels) or hiayh.com (Hostelling international hostels) .
Having had time to cool down, I think their real problem was the way they were travelling. It was a group from Mexico, five guys, four girls, mostly couples, and they were travelling across Europe together. Anoyone who backpacks quickly learns that large groups only travel together well on short trips of ten days or less. Any longer and you start having problems with fighting within the group. I think they just happened to stay at our place as the group was starting to disintigrate, and we caught some of the fallout.
Don’t worry too much. I’m a hostel traveller, I use the reviews (mostly at hostelz.com), and I look for an overall sense of how people like the hostel. There’s almost always one or two bad reviews, and it’s usually easy to see whether it was really a bad experience or if the travellers were just asses. And even if it seems legit, if the reviews are good overall, I don’t worry too much about a few bad ones- everyplace has a bad day or two, I figure.
Just out of curiosity, if you’re not the owner or manager, what are you?
Anyway, this reminds me of the anecdote I once heard; may have been a joke, may have been true. Sign in a European hostel: “Americans are requested to retire before 2 am. Germans are requested not to arise before 6 am. Italians are requested not to sing after 10 pm. Brits are requested not to fry kippers in the communal kitchen.”