behind the counter x Juan Olaya
La Banda Hostel, Sevilla
This week behind the counter we have Juan Olaya, manager of the HOSCAR award-winning La Banda Rooftop Hostel in Sevilla. Being voted the best hostel in Spain and the sixth-best in the world takes hard work and dedication. The hostel’s aim is to create unique and lasting travel memories based on music, food and an amazing social culture.
Juan not only manages the hostel, but he’s also an Architect and a very talented Musician! Working in a hostel was not what he intended to do but the mutual love for music is what brought Juan to La Banda Rooftop Hostel and the rest is what we are about to discover!
Learn from the best as Juan shares his impressive journey to hostel management success and a few key tips on creating a healthy social hostel culture and review management.
How did you end up working in a hostel?
It was actually something that wasn’t planned at all. I wasn’t planning on working full time because I was studying architecture at the time. I had a part-time job teaching English to kids, more like a summer job. I remember this random social media coincidence of a friend liking a picture of La Banda that mentioned that they were hiring, but I wasn’t actually actively looking for a job back then.
So initially, I wasn’t very interested, but I remember the post had some really interesting questions like naming your top five albums in history. So I thought to myself, okay, these people like music and if that’s the most important question, I like that!
The second and third ones were — how would you describe your perfect day? What would you cook for 30 people and why? So it wasn’t the typical questions. I also clicked on La Banda Rooftop Hostel’s Facebook page and I loved the pictures, the rooftop with the bartenders and everyone having fun. So I felt maybe it would be fun to work here, and I applied and got super lucky. The guys who started La Banda loved my application, and I started working with them. This was, I think, six and a half years ago.
Six and a half years is a long time. What kind of personal and professional growth did you have during this period?
The guys who started La Banda were these two English brothers and two other best friends and they’re all actually really, really like my brothers now. I started off working at the reception, at the kitchen and bartending sometimes, and all four owners were actively working at the hostel as well.
Little by little, they were delegating more tasks, and the hostel became better and better. We won the Hostelworld award for the best hostel in Spain a few times as well as the sixth-best hostel in the world. We were doing quite well and eventually, they had to create a position of a manager and they offered me that position.
They sold the business three years ago in 2018, and the new owners are Spanish. When the new owners came on board, for me, it was a time to develop an even stronger relationship with the hostel. It was kind of like my mission to keep their dream alive.
So these past six years has been a beautiful journey of personal growth and professional growth for me. The new owners are great because they came in with a lot of really good ideas. We were very lucky to have the boys as the owners because their ethic of work was really supportive and we created this kind of bonding and family-like vibe, and the new owners absolutely continued with that.
We started growing the business; we bought a building next door to expand La Banda and now we also offer high-end apartments as an accommodation type. We’re also thinking about handling another building for Suites. Right now, I’m managing all the different businesses. Six and a half years later (obviously with one year of pandemic, which almost doesn’t count), every year has been different to the previous ones, and that’s why I never felt tired of it.
What do you love most about running a hostel?
That’s a good question. I think hostels have such a special environment, especially our kind of hostels; nowadays ‘hostel’ has become such a trending word and everyone uses it and it sounds cool and fancy. Especially hostels that started first in this business and evolved similarly as we did; like Option Be in Cordoba, El Granado in Granada, and The Urban Jungle in Málaga.
We’re all really good friends and I think we have in mind something that differentiates us from all the hostels; which is providing a high-quality standard almost like a hotel but with the social atmosphere and keeping it alive with plenty of activities.
I don’t really like the word ‘boutique’ because it sounds pretentious but it’s where I feel comfortable. I love being able to provide a top-quality experience like comfort for the guests, but at the same time, making everyone feel like they’re home. A place where they can have the greatest time. They’re creating a special bond that last years, you know, and that for us is the biggest joy.
Also keeping the relationship between staff and guests super close which a lot of big chain hostels lack and the hostel spirit is absent. On the other hand, you have these hostels that have a social vibe, but they cannot or do not want to invest in good quality and comfort for guests, so the experience is very imbalanced.
I’ve never managed a big hostel or handled that kind of capacity, although I understand the challenges that come with it. The level of dedication and time a receptionist can dedicate for 120 people is not the same as dedicating it for 40 people, so I don’t know, for me, that’s not an excuse. I think you can get more creative; if you have 120 people, you definitely can hire more people to have a more balanced ratio of staff to guest.
Yellow Square in Rome is a big hostel, not a chain hostel but they’re really good. They’re that kind of hybrid thing of being a chain hostel but still have a lot of passion about what they do. They’re a big hostel but still keeping it very real, but I guess it comes with more challenges.
How would you describe La Banda Hostel’s essence?
La Banda when translated to English means ‘The Band’. For me, the essence of La Banda would be the band of brothers and the family bond we have built over the years.
We always use the catchphrase — Welcome to the La Banda family, however, for us this is not just a marketing catchphrase, it’s more than that. For instance, I had an off yesterday, I wasn’t working, but I went there to have dinner and to just have a drink on the rooftop with everyone else.
The best way to describe it is that it’s a place where you finish your shift and stay back a few hours more just to chill and chat. You don’t even feel like you’re working, you know, and that’s something very unique, at least for me. I also interact with a lot of guests and I’ve gathered from them that the hostel makes them feel at home and that feels very special too.
How are you coping during the pandemic and what are the major changes you had to make post-pandemic?
Right now in Spain, it’s a bit more chilled during these times because everything is so uncertain. I think the uncertainty is worrying.
We definitely try to be as respectful and as careful as possible about this situation, but at the same time, we need to get creative.
I think it’s time to get creative and to bring all these energies and take them out and just create something out of that because as a business, being closed for more than a year is tough. We’re super grateful to our owners for how they supported us as workers, how they supported the business and how they try to manage it in every possible way to hold on.
Like right now, we’re definitely going to open, but it’ll probably be a loss for the month at least. It’s super difficult with the structure we used to have; we used to have 10 people hired for a 40-bed hostel. The high-quality standard we provide required that amount of people but also required the prices, the average daily rate and the capacity to be super high. Anything below 90% and a 28 average daily rate for the whole hostel wouldn’t be a loss, but it would be really tight.
Obviously right now it’s like three of us working 40% of what we used to because we have ERTE which is a temporary regulation of employment, where the government pays us 70% of our wages but the company has to pay for social security. So we’re working super part-time and with reduced hours in reception. Also, for the first time in four or five years, we have volunteers back in the hostel.
When I started at the hostel, we had volunteers, but only for like a year and a half. Then the guys decided not to have volunteers anymore, especially because we only had 40 beds and we were full basically every day. Not just that, but because we wanted to professionalise the hostel even more and with having to change volunteer so often, it was very difficult and unstable. We preferred to invest in people because I know some other hostels; they have their business model based on volunteers whom you basically don’t pay, so it reduces cost, that’s their reality. We, however, believe in the other way of doing business because it’s not all about profits.
Wages to us is not an expense, it’s an investment. If you pay your staff well and value them, then they’re likely to be more productive.
Right now, everyone is figuring out a way to be more sustainable but everything is so unstable, it’s difficult. We’ve had to adapt; we try to stay positive on a personal level and remain connected to La Banda and its guests through social media and now we’ve reopened again. Let’s see how it goes, although we’re super excited about doing it again.
La Banda hostel has great reviews and ratings, what advice would you give for better review management?
We’ve always taken reviews super-seriously, anything below a 10 rating for me is not enough because I think we’re a 10 hostel. We always aim for a 10 but it was two or three years ago when I started implementing some new ideas that we gathered after talking to colleagues about it and seeing what other hostels do. These ideas were really good and helped us manage reviews better.
One thing we did on our PMS is that we encouraged each of our staff members to write a personal paragraph about a guest that they had an impactful interaction with or had a great meaningful conversation while out touring the city or over a drink.
Then at night, the person on the night shift would incorporate the personalised message into a template we made. After which the staff would send it as a WhatsApp message to the particular guest, thanking them and mentioning the impactful experience. We also encourage them to write a review on whichever booking platform they used if they had a similarly great experience. We explain how it would help us as an opportunity to improve. Sometimes people just forget, and people don’t really read emails, especially millennials and gen Z. WhatsApp, on the other hand, everybody uses.
In the WhatsApp text we send, we also subtly mention that ideally, nobody wants bad things mentioned on public forums but we definitely want to know about it, and I wouldn’t call it bad things, more like things to improve upon. So that’s how we encourage people to provide more reviews.
Another thing I did after a few months was a targeting campaign with MailChimp to leave reviews on Google which is super important, not just the OTAs. Google reviews are super, super important. On Google, you need to be beyond the 4.8 range to even be considered competitive in our particular range of hostels.
Obviously, it’s important to reply to every single review in every single OTA. Always reply and reply with something specific, not just like a template that you send to everyone. Reply to all the things that they mentioned improving and apologize for that and proactively say that you will improve it.
If someone says something that is unfair, don’t get into a confrontation, but make your stance very clear about something that they’re saying that is untrue. Usually, that doesn’t happen, but that could happen. And I think that’s really important to address it, especially as soon as possible.
I have made an Excel sheet with every single review organized with the points such as security, location, staff, and cleaning. Also, the details of the room and the things they mentioned worth improving and the things that were good.
Every month I go back to the excel sheet and see where we need to do better and what things need to be addressed. Of course, there is no perfect magic rule to make everything go to 9 or 10 points on booking.com, Hostelworld or Google reviews, but all these little things really make a difference. You need to be on top of what’s happening in your hostel, what people are saying about it and start encouraging people to leave a review.
Lastly, if a guest had a bad experience and you already know that and your staff knows that, don’t send a WhatsApp text to that guest encouraging them to leave a review because you don’t want to put too much pressure on someone who actually didn’t have a good time because that can happen. This is really important, and it’s a reality of our business. You cannot always be the best hostel in their lives for every single guest.
Hybrid hospitality is on the rise, what are your insights on it?
More hostels are breaking that glass ceiling of comfort which only hotels provided before, even attracting travellers who seek a super comfortable stay for which they’d usually go to a hotel.
As for hotels adopting the concept of organising offbeat activities like hostels, I think the better the services are on every platform, the better for the whole industry. Hotel goers will be more open to trying hostels and vice versa, so I think it benefits everyone.
Sometimes it’s more a matter of terminology, you know; how you use it, how you interpret it and how people can get confused. Especially in times like these, where everything is changing a lot. Even the type of traveller is changing a lot. With this terminology of hybrid accommodation also comes to my mind digital nomads prefer to stay long term in either hotels or hostels. As per my understanding, Guests are shifting to the hostel industry more than the other way around.
The only thing I’m a bit worried about is the price war, which is always worse for us hostels because people come to a hostel and they expect to pay 10 to 15 euros and get what they would get in a hotel, and that’s impossible. That’s absolutely impossible!
We have that recently because now there’s a big price war in Sevilla. Everyone wants to get the few customers that are here, and what people don’t realize and which is much better to do, is maintain a price level where we can all actually make our businesses work at least, rather than hiking up the prices like crazy or super reducing the prices. Because we have fewer people, most people think it’s the other way around- the fewer people, the cheaper I put the prices, the more customers I would get.
But at the end of the day, it’s not even going to solve your problems because even if you manage to sell 20 beds at 10 euros a bed, you will not make enough to even pay for expenses.
Pre-pandemic, our 4-bed room during the high season would sell for sixty euros a night on weekends. We were fully booked every weekend, almost every day. I hope with hybrid hospitality on the rise, the prices for hostels would rise.
Can you give us some tips on creating a great and healthy social culture?
We’re not a party hostel and we clearly mention that to everyone. As I explained it, we love people and having fun with our guests. We love going out. I don’t drink, but I love people having a few drinks if they want to get drunk. We’re not a party hostel because, in the end, we cater to guests from all different backgrounds and areas.
I think if you want to create a good social atmosphere, it’s really important to have very clear protocols about when and how you close different spaces and how staff are strict, but with good vibes, and an understandable perspective about all the things you do or don’t allow.
We always let our guests know that this is like a home to us and inform them of the party and noise restrictions because it’s in a residential area and obviously no one wants problems with the cops or their neighbours. When you appeal to your guests like that, they truly understand the situation.
Creating a social atmosphere for any hostel is key. Communal areas are the essence and the heart of your social atmosphere. I’ve been to many hostels that don’t do a good job about that because they don’t have a good common area.
I guess this comes from an architectural mind, but we had a lot of pressure in believing that social interactions only happen in good social spaces. This is true for the social success of a city too as well as a hostel which is like a small ecosystem; it’s like a city within a building.
Good social spaces where people can interact should look good but they must be comfortable and convenient for the guests; like putting in some beautiful piece of odd, comfortable cushions, a good selection of music playing on low volume, ports to connect their device, and round tables where more people hang out. We have a minibar at the reception and on the rooftop terrace, which is our main place.
We’re lucky because we’re in Sevilla and a rooftop is pretty usable. If you don’t have a rooftop, you can have a closed rooftop or come up with many creative ideas about it.
Of course, something has to happen in these spaces. If you check our pre-pandemic board, we had activities and things happening every morning, afternoon, and night, every single day of the week and every night. So we have four things happening inside and outside the hostel every single day! And we would change every season.
We’re permanently in touch with bike tour companies and walking tour companies, we did our own bar crawl, had live music, game nights, trivia nights, family dinners, morning communal breakfasts, cooking classes, yoga classes and many other activities.
So there’s always something for the guests to be part of or experience while increasing the chances of interaction and making lifelong friends.
