YHAgroup.org.uk

In keeping up with what’s going on in YHA, one vital source is the press release page on their web site. It’s the official outlet for YHA-related news stories.

But there’s a problem: the only way to know when a new story has been posted is to go and visit that page. Every day you have to check on the off-chance that a new announcement might have been made (well, you do if you’re running a hostelling news web site!), and pretty unrewarding those visits can be when you remember that YHA went for six months last year without finding a single story worth remarking on.

How much simpler life would be if the press release page had an RSS feed. Then we could keep track of it using a feed reader alongside whatever other blogs and news sources we might follow.

Well, rather than wait for the upcoming YHA website redesign to (hopefully) fill this need, I decided to do something about it myself. I’ve written a program that regularly visits the YHA web site, scans it for new stories, and generates an RSS feed from what it sees. It also checks the special offers page, and makes a feed from that too. All you have to do is pipe them into your feed reader of choice (personally I use Google Reader) and you can be kept right up-to-date on every new development at Matlock. I’ve also built similar feeds to pick up news from the other UK hostelling organisations.

Here are the addresses to follow:

• YHA Press Releases Feed
• YHA Special Offers Feed
• SYHA News Feed
• HINI News Feed

These are pretty basic feeds: only the title of each story is shown, not the content, and the dates are either those given on the site (where there is one), or the date when my script first saw the story (where there isn’t). Note that the associations sometimes give a story a date that’s some days before (or even after) the date it appears on their website.

Feed readers aren’t the only place where RSS feeds can be useful. There are various tools out there that can use them to syndicate the content of the site providing the feed onto another (RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”). I’ve used some of these tools to produce the “Hostelling News” box on the Leicester YHA home page – this shows the six most recent hostelling news stories from a variety of sources.

Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting you start hiding in the bushes around Matlock, stalking the YHA’s esteemed Chief Executive. Instead you can do it from the comfort of your computer!

Caroline has started her own Twitter account, so you can follow what our glorious leader is doing – or at least what she wants to tell us about it. I don’t know how much we’ll learn from it, but it should be welcomed as part of YHA’s new efforts to communicate with the membership.

YHA have abandoned the rather clunky ResponseMX mapping software that they were using on their website in favour of the widely used Google Maps service.

Visitors can now pan, scroll, zoom in and out, and get a high quality map at each scale – rather than the grainy mess that the previous system sometimes provided. In addition, they can view a hostel’s position on a satellite photo – literally providing a picture of the surrounding countryside.

An important difference between the two services is that the old system’s tightest zoom was to an Ordnance Survey 1:25000 map, the new one zooms in to a regular street map. Lacking street names, the OS maps were almost useless for hostels in big towns, though other details gave them the edge in rural locations. However, by using the satellite view, the would-be hosteller can usually compensate for any shortcomings of the street map.

One or two hostels will be ill-served by the change in mapping. Tanners Hatch is one example where the new map gives very little help in finding the place, I’m sure there are others. I think the YHA should supplement the regular map with a sketch map to help in getting to these really hard-to-find places.

That issue notwithstanding, I think this is a big improvement to the YHA web site and one that should be welcomed (and not just because I suggested it last year!).

Many ways have been tried to get the hostelling experience over to people who haven’t experienced it. Photographs, blogs, forums, media articles – all aim at tackling people’s misconceptions and bringing them into the wonderful world of hostels.

But independent chain St Christopher’s Inns have gone one step further and installed a live webcam in one of their dormitories. Now you can watch in real time as the happy hostellers wander around, look for their socks, or throw things at the bloke in the corner for snoring too loud. Nor is it going to stop there…

Interacting with the dorm dwellers you see on screen isn’t far away either and soon you guys will be able to send these backpackers free beer for all the fun stuff they do, and sound off fog horns in response to the not so popular antics!

I do hope this doesn’t catch on. There are some sights and sounds when our group is getting up in the morning that not even the internet is ready for…

When YHA re-launched its website back in 2007, it marked a sea change in the organisation’s marketing strategy and in the way it did business. Now, an article in The Marketer describes how they went about it.

There’s not much in the article that will surprise seasoned YHA-watchers, but it’s interesting to see one particular shift spelled out explicitly:

While the YHA’s fundamental product is good-value accommodation, it decided that the market for young backpackers travelling on a budget was already well catered for, and plumped for honing in on the market for young families instead.

The shiny new website (combined with press advertising and coverage that the article doesn’t mention) improved the public image of the YHA, but the job’s not done yet:

Changing people’s perceptions of the YHA is an ongoing issue. “We’ve been measuring the perception of the YHA brand through focus groups and telephone surveys and, at first, the new website did mean that people were responding to the brand more positively.

“But we didn’t see the same level of progress last year,” [Duncan] Simpson admits. “There is a stereotype of the hostelling industry that I have to fight against every day.”

Keep fighting, Duncan!

The Press Association are reporting some good news for YHA:

Online reservations for overnight stays in youth hostels in England and Wales have increased by nearly a third, bucking the credit crunch, it was revealed.

Hostelling International, covering youth hostel associations in more than 80 countries, said 87,123 overnight stays in England and Wales were booked on its website in 2008, a rise of 31% on the year before.

The figures were part of a total of nearly 1.4 million overnight stays in more than 4,000 youth hostels across the world booked on the website last year.

It’s not entirely clear, but I think they’re only talking about Hostelling International’s own site rather than the YHA site. These figures would thus imply a rise in overseas visitors booking UK hostels, perhaps attracted by the weak state of the pound.

Another important factor would be YHA’s widening roll-out of online booking to its hostels during the last couple of years. There were simply a whole load more beds available to be booked in 2008 compared with the year before.

That doesn’t entirely invalidate these figures though. Presumably a proportion of would-be hostellers were previously willing to book by phone or mail, or just to turn up and hope for the best. However, there must have been at least some potential customers who were lost to more web-savvy rivals. These people were spending their money with the YHA last year!

STOP PRESS: Travel industry news site eTurboNews are reporting that last year, world-wide hostel bookings reached an all time high.

Some exciting new features have been added to the YHA web site today, adding some much needed interactivity with its members to an otherwise one-way channel of communication.

Firstly, Karl Sheperdson’s Diary of a Trustee has morphed into the YHA Blog, and it’s a proper blog too! Unlike some previous efforts this is the real thing, complete with RSS feeds and comments enabled. All Karl’s trustee posts have been ported across, but there’s no new content just yet. Keep your eyes peeled for new posts and (who knows) maybe some other authors too.

But that’s not all. Not only can members post comments on the subjects Karl wants to talk about, they can also raise their own issues on the new YHA discussion forum. It’s early days, and there’s only a handful of cheerleading topics under discussion so far, but this is a breath of fresh air. I hope to see plenty of people posting what they love about YHA, but also where they’re falling short. Some robust and open discussion of the issues facing the Association could be a good way to reconnect with their members.

Elsewhere the accommodation pages have been given an overhaul. There’s a new look to the maps, but I can’t say anything more about them because they don’t work on my PC. Why don’t they just use Google Maps like everyone else? Also, when you view a particular hostel’s page, that hostel is pre-selected in the “Find Accommodation” section on the right hand side. Previously, once you’d found the page of the hostel you wanted, you had to find it again in the drop-down lists before you could book it. It’s good to see that mistake corrected.

One of my criticisms of the new YHA web site was the picture they were using on the home page. As I stated in my review back in January, whilst many of the photos on the site are excellent, they chose a “slightly wonky, slightly blurry” shot of Oxford YH to front the site.

Well, not any more! Somebody must have been listening, as there’s now a stunning aerial photograph of Lizard YH which really shows off the extraordinary kinds of places you can stay at as a hosteller. Bravo YHA!

The email address that you should use when contacting YHA central office on group-related matters has been changed. It used to be localgroups@yha.org.uk, which perhaps doesn’t reflect the non-geographical members of the group fraternity.

It’s now affiliatedgroups@yha.org.uk – update your address books now!

The list of affiliated groups that used to be available (after diligent searching) on the old YHA site has finally found it’s way onto the new one nearly two months after its launch. It falls a long way short of the coverage that was talked about at the Coalport Meeting, but it’s better than nothing.

The list contains at least one error (as I write, the contact email for Leicester group is years out of date), so it’s worth checking to see if your group’s properly listed. As far as I know, the list on this site remains the most complete and up-to-date listing online, if you could check that one as well while you’re at it, I’d be grateful.