behind the counter x Mel James
Roatan’s Backpacker’s Hostel, Honduras
Meet Mel James, Founder of Roatan’s Backpacker’s Hostel in Honduras. Mel’s got the warmest smile. She’s an exceptional mother and host, whose hostel journey actually started out of a need to provide a better life for her kids.
Starting a hostel was not planned, but it’s the best decision she has made because she simply loves what she does, interacting with guests and forming long-lasting friendships.
Mel’s also an environmentalist who absolutely enjoys the creative aspects of running a hostel. Join us as she shares her humble journey with us and gives us her valuable advice on starting a hostel and making any hostel more earth-friendly.
How did you end up moving to Roatán?
I was travelling on my own initially and then ended up staying in Roatán, where I used to teach scuba diving, and that’s how I got here. I left for a few years after and moved back to Canada, where I’m originally from and where my kids were born.
We moved back down here when they were one and half years and three years. I’ve been on my own with my kids since I was pregnant, so I’ve done a variety of jobs to keep us afloat when they were little, like I used to bake and sell it along the touristic streets and areas.
So how did it all lead up to starting a hostel in Roatán?
I had my house already built on the property. I had a little apartment underneath my house that I used to rent out on travel forums and it always did pretty well. It was just a nice little extra income apart from working at a resort managing reservations, guest services and marketing.
At the time, I was very frustrated with the school that my kids were at and I wanted to switch them to a better school, but I couldn’t afford it with what I was earning. So I asked for a raise at my work and they turned me down and they said maybe in another six months. I remember coming home feeling so frustrated and so upset; I was really banking on getting that and changing their school.
It got me trying to brainstorm and figure out how to make more money because I didn’t really have time to take on a second job since I was working a lot already. I knew if I started at a different place or job, I would have to start from scratch and with less money.
One day, my neighbor who worked at the hardware store down the road said that building supplies were on sale. I had been saving for a pool, so I used that money to build something and rent it out instead, since it would bring me money instead of just spending money.
A couple hours later we had like a tentative floor plan sketched out for the start of a hostel and I got an estimate of the materials. A week and a half later, I was starting construction. I started really small, I had just two dorm rooms. I was still working full time at my other job. I would go to work in the mornings, I did half time from the resort and halftime from home. I’d come back home from my work and paint the new building, setting up the website. It was mid-January that I started building. End of March, that little building was done, and I had my first guest!
I continued working my job for the next six months because it was a new business and it wasn’t making me much money; I ended up having to borrow to finish things. Then six months later they did give me the raise that they had put off, but I’m so thankful and I think sometimes God uses situations to put you in a direction that’s good for you and that you would never choose on your own because it’s hard.
I love my business. It supports us and it’s wonderful for my creative side. Seeing how I can grow and develop, and how to market it. I love the guests that I have. It’s been so wonderful and honestly, if I had gotten my raise when I wanted it, I would have never been pushed in that direction. That’s my hostel story.
I started off with a space for 10 people and now the hostel can sleep 35 to 40 people and we just celebrated my 10th year in business.
How would you describe the essence of Roatan’s Backpackers hostel?
It’s like a home for people, a home when they’re travelling. It’s got a very warm atmosphere and people feel very welcomed, not only by me and our staff but there’s a great connection between all the different guests too.
I have a lot of guests that normally stay long term. The pandemic has changed the demographic but normally every winter I have at least eight to ten guests that are staying one to three months and in the summer too. Then a few guests that are here for a few weeks and a lot that are here for a week at least. It’s enough time that they can really form friendships, and form a bond with me too. It’s really like a little home for people where they can kind of just relax, do some cooking, get to know some other people and feel a little bit mothered, especially if they’ve been traveling for a while.
Roatan’s backpackers hostel has received the ‘Green Leader’ gold rating from Trip Advisor and is a member of Go Blue Central America Geotoursim. Can you tell us a bit more about the green initiatives undertaken by the hostel?
I think being on a small island you realize, much more strongly, of your impact on the environment.
You see on the shoreline when garbage washes up. Our power is sporadic and our public water is sometimes sporadic too, so you’re a lot more conscious of what you consume and your impact on the environment. That has been a motivation for me to be as environmentally conscious as possible.
At the hostel, we have a gutter system that collects rainwater and puts it into a big cistern. so we use that in combination with a shallow well.
Part of our power usually comes from solar energy. We’re waiting on a part right now, but normally, there’s that. We’ve also tried to swap out as much as possible to everything that’s more energy conscious. I’ve installed LED light bulbs everywhere. Pretty much almost all of my exterior lighting is little solar lights that’s independent of the solar energy system on the roof. They’re just independent lights that have either a solar panel on top or a little cord with the solar panel, so it’s great. It also means that you don’t have to wire them in around the property, you can just stick those lights anywhere.
We’ve also started composting because about 25% of your garbage is food waste, right? So we have different bins placed around the property. In the communal kitchen, we have a bin to tell people to compost and then any accommodation that has its own kitchen, we normally put a little container and tell them to put their compost in it and leave it at the doorstep and we’ll put it in a compost container.
Last, we use on-demand gas hot water heaters, so that we don’t have to keep the whole tank of water hot. We also put little signage all around the property letting people know to turn off fans and lights when not in use because unfortunately, when people are coming from somewhere where electricity is cheap and it’s easy, they just don’t think about it sometimes.
What were the kind of challenges you faced during the lockdown period?
We faced many challenges. To start off, we had eight months of zero income. They shut the borders for most of that period and then the first two months after the borders opened, we still had no business and zero income. This doesn’t mean that your expenses go away, so we still had expenses to pay for during those months and some services like the internet weren’t allowing any reduction in service, so you still had to pay your big bills even though you have no guests to use it.
I’m Canadian, so I was able to go and work in Canada. I got a job as a nanny for two little boys, which meant that I could keep things financially afloat down here. I could keep my two staff with reduced hours so they still had jobs, because there was very limited government support for everyone who was suffering economically.
The real challenge is following that. When you have no money, of course, you can’t spend any money, so any maintenance that wasn’t top priority had to be shelved. Things like repainting that we normally do kind of constantly in this environment, we had to put off doing. I normally bring down sheets and towels anytime I go up to the states or Canada as they’re better quality and cheaper there. Now sheets get holes or stained and at this point, you can only do what you can do. The main focus is to keep your business open and not go under.
Unfortunately, there have been people travelling during that pandemic that I have to say, I think are just blind to the struggles that some people are going through because there were a couple reviews like “the property looks neglected” or “my sheets had stains”, and it’s upsetting because they really have no idea how difficult of a year it’s been. They are clearly coming from somewhere where they have not been touched personally, to such a strong economic extent. The power of a review lasts forever. Getting a review like that when I’m trying to regenerate my business was probably the most frustrating thing for me.
The rest of it was just completely beyond my control, and I knew I was very fortunate to at least be able to find another source of income. On the island, there haven’t been all that many COVID cases, so at least everybody’s been healthy, but the challenge of going through that lack of income was tough.
Now things are starting to regenerate, I quit my nanny job and now we’re repainting everything. I’m back home and with guns blazing, I’m going full speed ahead!
How has it been post-pandemic for the hostel?
I think it’s still a little early to use the term “post-pandemic” because I think we are still in the middle of it, right? There’s still a lot of restrictions in terms of people’s movements. We can’t get in the same flow because travelling is more difficult, a lot of countries are requiring testing which adds to the expense and flights are changing, even being cancelled sometimes, so it just gets too much for people to deal with and that being said, things are definitely recovering and it’s way better than a year ago.
Of course, there are still some things that we have to abide by; our dorms are shut since the government sent out about a 50-page document of procedures and policies that hotels and hostels have to follow.
Pretty much anything that is shared is off the table, which is not so hard for me because I have a lot of private options too, including little single rooms for single travellers. So there are still things that are budget friendly for people that are travelling on their own. Also, I rent out the dorm rooms as a whole room if there’s a group of people that are travelling together.
With the communal kitchen, we had to shut it down for quite a while and then figured out a workaround. Now we have a sign-out sheet; one set of guests takes the key at a time and sanitizes the surfaces, locks it up and then the next set of guests can go in.
We have to wear masks whenever we greet people and have sanitizer placed everywhere; you know the kind of things that are pretty much worldwide but it’s definitely improving things. Honduras now doesn’t require a negative test if you’ve been double vaccinated at least 14 days prior to arrival, so that helps to encourage tourism and it makes it easier for people to come in. Some flights are making a comeback, so there are various flight options that help as well.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a hostel?
My beginning was not standard, there was no big business plan and well-thought-out scheme, but what I think really worked for me was to start off small and to grow with my business. That way, I could see the needs and fill the needs as they came up rather than thinking, “okay, I should put in 50 dorm beds.”
I started small, and I added a couple of private rooms, and soon realized they are actually what are selling, so I created more of those.
When I saw people would sometimes arrive late at night and be a little disoriented, not sure where to go to grab a bite, I decided to put in a little restaurant.
So every little growth has been in response to what I’ve seen and I think being really in tune to your guests is vital because if you’re not constantly interacting with them, you won’t know what it is that they need.
Also, having a mix of accommodations, I think is really great in attracting a more wide market base. So I have dorms, little single rooms, double rooms and then I have some apartment style units, which means I have guests from 18 years of age to guests who are in their 70s.
I have older guests who like the idea of the hostel who maybe have money, but they just don’t like to put it all in accommodations. They like to meet other travellers or maybe they were big time backpackers in their younger days. So it’s great because they can choose an apartment and have their own bit of privacy but still hang out with other guests.
For the guests that are 18 that have limited money, there are cheap little single options for them. It’s really cute to see the different guests interacting because sometimes I’ll have guests maybe in their 40s who are totally fine financially and they’ll take out one of the younger guests and buy them some food or give them their leftover groceries and it’s lovely to see that.
In terms of a business sense, having that range of accommodation has been great because I’m not dependent on one small part of the market; I’ve got a much wider market base.
Lastly, can you give us some tips on attracting and encouraging guests to travel again?
I think right now COVID is pretty much everywhere. So if you don’t travel anywhere, it doesn’t mean that you won’t get it or come in exposure to it. I think you can travel, particularly, if you’re going and staying in one place for a while and then you’re just following the same norms as you were following at home.
If you’re going into a grocery store here or if you’re going into a grocery store wherever you’re from, it’s the same kind of risk and you’re wearing your mask and you’re hand sanitizing, so is that elevating your risk factor? I don’t think so and because you either need to have a negative test or be double vaccinated when you’re coming in, hopefully that is eliminating some of the possibility of things in.
I mean realistically, it’s not just our health that COVID is affecting, the economic impact is huge. For our island, 80% of the economy is tourism, so there’s far more people suffering from not being able to feed their families than there is from the health impact.
In terms of encouraging people, I don’t know if there’s really any specific thing that you can do, but I do have a good connection with past guests on social media and some of them have come back multiple times. So I’m hoping that the same thing will happen this winter.
