What we’re trying to do is make finding people to go do things in the real world, in the city that you’re visiting, as easy and seamless as possible…
Hello! So yesterday I told you all a little bit about the Hallways App but today I am releasing a very cool interview with Ben Moshe, the founder of Hallways, so that he can tell you exactly what it’s all about! He did come up with the app so his explanation will be much better than mine!
Not only can you scroll down and read through the interview to get all the juicy details… we even recorded it for you! Just press play below!
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/158659543″ params=”color=ff00fa&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]p.s. I got carried away being nosy about the American hostel market! Hope you guys don’t mind!
The Interview…!
What I’m most passionate about in the world is travel. My best travel experiences have come in hostels, and the reason is that hostels aren’t just a cheap bed; it’s a way of travel that is designed around a social experience and I think that there’s so much joy in that…
Me: You’re currently in Europe promoting the Hallways App, what made you start in London to try and get the movement going?
Ben: So basically, London is the biggest hostel city in Europe. There are, depending on how you count if you ask, about 120 hostels in London, and London is kind of the first stop I think for backpackers and young travellers around the world. It’s obviously one of the biggest, most travelled, and interesting cities in the world, and there’s a strong hostel culture. So that made sense basically as a city that had a strong critical mass.
I think it’s terrible as a Brit that I don’t know that about hostels in London.
Well, one of the things that I found in London is that although it’s a huge hostel city, it probably wasn’t the ideal place for us to start. I’m actually focusing a little more of my attention now on Central Eastern Europe; Prague, Budapest, etc. Because London, although there are a million backpackers there and there’s a ton of really great hostels, it’s very spread out and London has so much going on across the city that it gets a little bit harder to reach people. Whereas a city like Prague for example, where I am now, there are less people, less tourists, but it’s much more condensed and the backpacker scene is centred around a few key places and activities. So it’s a little bit easier to get in front of people.
While you’ve been in Europe have you focused on companies similar to Astor & YHA [in London] or are you going for the more individual hostels?
I’m trying to do both at one time. I think ideally it would be great if we could get some of the bigger companies on board and we have done that. Astor & YHA are partnering with us to get their events on there and talk to their customers. But what I’m trying to do is basically work with the best hostels, and when I say best what I mean is the hostels that are really focusing on creating a great experience for their customers as opposed to just offering a cheap bed. It means great events, really good staff that has a lot of interaction with guests. And sometimes you find those in big companies and the bigger chains, and sometimes you find it in really small hostels that maybe only have fifty beds, but have a great track record of knowing their city, of knowing what’s going on, and really directly communicating and forming a community with their guests. Regardless I think that’s the kind of hostel that I’d like to work with because they have the most in common with what Hallways is trying to do, which is just to create a great travel experience for travellers all the time.
Are you going to allow local businesses to promote their events, or is it just for hostels?
That’s something that we’re looking at down the road, but right now there are basically three types of events on Hallways. The first are hostel events, and those are actually uploaded by the hostel. So that could be the tours that they offer, if they do spaghetti dinners, anything really, happy hour at the bar.
The second type is city events, so these are events that we’re actually uploading at Halllways, and these would be concerts, DJ nights, street parties, anything around town that we think would be interesting to our users, and you will be able to see those at any hostels you’re staying at in that city.
The third type of event is guest events. So as a guest I can actually create my own event that could be something really simple. If I’m in London it could be ‘Go Visit Buckingham Palace Tomorrow at 1pm’ and then anyone else that’s interested in that can sign up and join me. Or it could be something a little bit more involved. So maybe I sign in to my hostel in London a week before I arrive, and I know that I want to go see a Chelsea match and there’s a game next week. I can post that and then other people that are interested in football can see my event, they can comment and join the event and message me, we can buy tickets together, and then when we all arrive next week we can actually go out together. So those are the primary event types on Hallways now. In the future we definitely are looking in to allowing local businesses that are near hostels to add their own sponsored events, whether that be a DJ night, a happy hour or something as simple as a restaurant special at a place near a hostel.
I think guest events are awesome! I’ve seen so many guests missing out on going out to see the Parliament or things like that in Budapest and getting them all together and linking up is quite nice to see as a hostel worker.
I did have one question about safety. It might be irrelevant now with apps like Tinder and mobile dating, but do you ever worry that potentially some sketchy locals might get on the app and see travellers who are logging in to hostels as vulnerable targets?
I think user safety is really our number one concern and we have designed the app to be very conscious of privacy and safety so you’ll see when you log in that we don’t really reveal any distinguishing information at all. We only show first name and last initial, we never link back to your Facebook page and we use your one Facebook profile photo which is actually a public photo on Facebook that is public for every Facebook user. So really we just try and keep the information to a minimum and the information that we share we pull from Facebook, but you can actually choose to share or not share any of the limited information that we pull, and it’s not very much to begin with, basically where you’re from, where you went to school, etc. So I think that it is certainly something that we thought about when building the product and we’ve taken steps to make sure that there shouldn’t be any issues.
I guess if it is the Facebook information like you said then that’s out there anyway for anyone to see.
Yeah, we have tried really hard to create something that replicates the hostel experience. So the information that you see on Hallways is really supposed to be what you might ask someone when you run in to them for the first time. So, “what’s your name”, “where are you from”, “how old are you?” and you can see other hostels that users have checked in to. But there’s nothing there that is private or sensitive; again we never show last names, and we really respect users’ anonymity and their right to not give out a bunch of information to the public. Hallways is designed really to start a conversation between travellers, and to let people meet other people that are going to be in their hostel or in the same town. But really we’re designed to get people to actually meet via the app and then go do things in real life, and I think that the design of the application reflects that.
It definitely does! And is there a ‘friends’ option so people can stay in contact with people and see where they might be going next if they get on really well with them?
So right now, what you would do is basically you can message users back and forth and stay in touch just by continuing the message or check their profile later on. Of course if you wanted to give someone your Facebook information over private message within Hallways you could. One of the things that we’re exploring as a future feature is the ability to send someone on Facebook or other social media directly through the app and that’s definitely something that we’ll look in to in the future but right now the way that you would do it is mostly through the messaging on the app.
I was talking to someone recently and they were saying that while they were travelling they were using Tinder to get in touch with other people who might be in the area. Do you think that you might have any competition from apps like that?
Sure. I think that there are a lot of different ways to meet people in any city and while travelling; we’re not the first or only app that promises to help you meet people while you travel. What I think is different about Hallways, and I believe is more useful and will make us more compelling to our users is that we’ve organised our user base by hostel and organised our events by hostel, so even though you can see people elsewhere in the city and you can see events all across town we’re showing you first the people who are actually staying under the same roof as you. And I think that, in my experience backpacking and I did a lot of research before building out Hallways and I found the same thing, is that the social experience when travelling for most people most of the time really starts, and for the most part ends, in the hostels. So the people that you’re most likely to meet, to go out with during the day and night to bars and clubs are the people that are staying in your hostel because it’s just so much easier. There are certainly, again, many ways that you can meet people and I think it’s great for people to use and try all of them, but we’ve tried to build something that will make it even easier and reflects the way that people travel and meet people in real life.
I love that you seem to be as enthused about hostels as I am, and how great they are to the travelling experience!
I’ve just had so many great experiences personally and I left a job at Amazon, which was kind of a good job, to build out Hallways and the reason I did that is that I really wanted to do something I was passionate about; and what I’m most passionate about in the world is travel. My best travel experiences have come in hostels, and the reason is that hostels aren’t just a cheap bed; it’s a way of travel that is designed around a social experience and I think that there’s so much joy in that and I’ve personally had such incredible experiences that I am very passionate about it. I’ve also had experiences that weren’t as perfect. The idea behind Hallways is that I was staying at a large hostel in Amsterdam that will remain nameless and there were all these things that I wanted to go do in Amsterdam and I was meeting people but out of the hundreds of people in this hostel I would only meet a few in the common room and maybe the morning, and I just wasn’t finding people that wanted to do the same things that I did. But I knew that there must be those people literally under the same roof in the same building and I just wished there was a way of connecting with those people that I knew were probably going to go to the Van Gogh Museum and would literally be in the museum at the same time as I would be, but how would I know about it? And that is what Hallways is designed to do; you can post any kind of event or interest that you have and other people who are interested can see that and find you. It’s not supposed to turn a hostel in to a chatroom, what we’re trying to do is make finding people to go do things in the real world, in the city that you’re visiting, as easy and seamless as possible.
Your hostel in Amsterdam, it had a common room, but there are so many hostels out there that don’t. Which firstly is very strange in itself, but if they don’t then Hallways is another great way for people to get in touch with each other.
I exactly agree. Some places have great common rooms, some don’t, sometimes you’ll be travelling with a group and sometimes you’ll be travelling alone, and again it’s just a tool that will hopefully make it a lot easier for people to meet other travellers who have the same interest and go do fun stuff, which is really the point of visiting a new city.
Exactly. So you left your job at Amazon and went out in to the travel market and that’s because you spotted this huge gap in hostel travel. Do you think, or do you agree with me, that hostels seem to be just absolutely blossoming in terms of where they can go for business and also where they can go for travellers.
Absolutely, 100%. I think that there is a huge gap in the market for hostels. Youth travel, and not everyone that stays at hostels are young but most of them are, youth travel is a humongous market, much bigger than people realise. And I think that one of the issues is that there are some stigmas about hostel customers. There’s a perception that maybe was true 20 or 30 years ago that hostel customers are showing up on long term buses and they’re cooking every meal in the hostel, and they basically have no money to spend. Certainly, hostels are popular in large parts because they are cheap, but you see in the market that that’s simply just not the case anymore about hostel customers. There are people from all walks of life, and people are not staying there only because it’s inexpensive, they’re staying there because they want that social experience. And you can see that with the rise of design hostels, such as Generator. My home in the States has kind of been a dead zone for hostels forever, and now there are a number of companies that are trying to build out really nice social hostels in the States; it’s slow but it’s starting to happen. And yeah I think there really is a lot of opportunity from a business standpoint, and certainly it’s an under-appreciated market in general.
The States is a really funny one because I guess a lot of travellers in Europe are already from Europe, and also you get a lot of people from Australia and America itself. But, apart from HI Hostels which I hear a lot of on social media, you don’t hear a lot of the American hostel market at all; is that because a lot of people are more likely to come away from America when they’re travelling as opposed to Europeans going to America to travel?
You mean, in the States why there’s not more action for hostels? There are probably a number of reasons. I think the issue with hostels in the US is that the US is just so big geographically and public transit is not particularly developed compared to Europe. Obviously, especially in the East Coast, you can take trains from place to place but people don’t tend to do the same types of trips in the US, and as a consequence there just hasn’t been the development of a real hostel culture. Again, you can build a hostel, and there are hostels in every major city in the US, I’ve stayed in some of them, and what I found is there are exceptions. There are certainly great hostels that are up there with the best ones in Europe, Asia, and South-America but generally the culture just isn’t quite as developed; common rooms aren’t as lively and it just hasn’t developed to the same degree in the States. But I think that slowly that is changing, again there are some bigger companies that are moving in to the space. New York I know in particular as a city is building up hostels and I think over time it will change and develop in the States.
I hope so, because I’ve never been to the States and I’d love to do it travelling around hostels!
Yeah! It makes sense and what I think will work better in the States are probably design hostels because the kind of stereotypical, get a rail-pass budget travel is just so much harder in the States; it’s destinations are so spread out and so far apart that what you’ll probably get more of is more of a flash-packer kind of travel and I think the design hostels will really appeal to that. But again there are places in the States that are starting to do this, there are some hotels that are actually moving in a more hostel direction in terms of building out common rooms and having events running daily. So I do think that you’re going to see this because especially today, with all of the technology that we have, and again I think this is one way that Hallways fits in, people are just really looking for a more social experience when they travel. I think the US is certainly no different and we’ll start to see that in the next few years.
And you can see that in your app with the events being such a focal part of it all.
That’s exactly right, and I think what I try to do, I think when people show up at a hostel they have two questions: “who’s here?” and “what’s going on?” The “what’s going on part”, a lot of what that is, is “who’s going?” So I may be a lot more likely to go on a walking tour if a couple of the people that I met at the pub tour last night are also going on that tour. Anyone that’s stayed in a hostel knows that’s how it works; you meet people and then you go do things with them over the course of your stay, maybe you even travel to the next city together. The point of Hallways is to take the hostel experience that already exists in real life and organise it using technology to just give people more resources as far as learning what’s going on.
Absolutely. We would be running amazing events. I don’t know if you heard of the Spa Parties in Budapest but if people weren’t showing up for the pre-drinks but were coming later, and people who were at pre-drinks didn’t think people were going, then they just wouldn’t go and they’d miss out on a great experience.
But those are most of the questions I had about the Hallways App, apart from when it will be available?
We’re available across Europe now, you can access the app on any browser at HallwaysApp.com. You can check in right from your browser. Right now we’re a responsive app so it’s really designed for mobile but it will work perfectly on mobile, tablet, desktop, whatever you like. We’re currently working on native apps, in other words apps that you’ll actually download from the iOS and Android stores and those will be released hopefully by the end of the month. We’ve almost completed our iOS and Android apps as well so you’ll be to download those and have them on your mobile device.
I think we’ve covered a lot of it. I just would like to encourage people to go give us a look and if you like the concept share it with your friends because the more people we get going on it, the more value it will add for everyone and really just serve the community as a tool to make travel better and that’s the goal that we have at Hallways.
I do think it is a great goal and it is so useful for the hostel community. The web browser is really great, on the phone and on the laptop, as I’ve tried it on both. So until the app comes out, the website is great!
We put a lot of effort in to design and making the app extremely simple. There aren’t that many things that you can do on Hallways; it’s really who’s here and what’s going on because we know that that’s what hostel guests care about. Over time we’ll build out more features, be it reviews, restaurant recommendations, photos, videos, etc. But we really just want to create this core experience of finding out who’s going to be in the hostel at the same time as you, and around your city, and all of the cool events in your hostel and around town, making that super easy to do. That’s the experience that you’ll see now at HallwaysApp.com.
*****
So I hope you all enjoyed the interview and got to lear a bit more about Hallways than I gave you all yesterday!
Again a HUGE thanks to Ben for letting me pick his brains!
Let me know in the comments if you guys are excited to use the app! I’ll see you on it!
Lots of love,
