behind the counter x Quinn Matthews
This week behind the counter we have Quinn Matthews, owner of Apollo Bay Backpackers situated in the tourist town of Apollo Bay in Australia and nestled amongst several natural landscapes that can give other landscapes a run for their money!
Quinn was acquainted with the hospitality industry from very early on; naturally following a path that led him to start his own hostel. Quinn gives us some valuable tips on getting the basics right, pricing post-COVID and how involving your guests and staff in building the hostel can prove to be an enriching and rewarding experience.
Tell us a bit about yourself and how did your journey in the hospitality industry begin?
I was born in Apollo Bay which is a tourist town and I grew up in a motel that my parents own around the corner from where I am now.
Growing up in a tourist town; it wasn’t uncommon for kids to get part-time jobs at the age of 13 or 14. I suppose it’s got to do with servicing the big influx of people coming in every summer. So not only did I work in the motel just doing things as part of the family but I also taught surfing at a surf school and worked at the news agency. I was also involved in surf lifesaving and maybe that’s not directly related to hospitality but it’s all interwoven when you’re in a tourist town.
A few years after high school, I was working for a big construction company as part of management in Perth. That’s where I got the taste of travel a little more and where I met my colleague from South Africa who was on his third passport!
I was 22 at the time and he was applying for an Australian passport then. He would tell me these amazing stories about backpacking through Europe. So I got a passport and booked a flight to London!
I had no idea about Europe and I didn’t really research or have a plan. After staying in London for 4 days, I somehow ended up in Lisbon, Portugal where I had booked my accommodation at Destination Hostel for two nights. I ended up being a guest there for an entire month! I even ended up working there as a volunteer for around six months, and I did a bit of everything like night reception 2 nights a week, making some beds, making some pancakes for breakfast and one day a week I did free walking tours.
After that, I came back to Australia and I continued working in Western Australia. A year and a half later I came back to Victoria. This place was for sale and it used to be a backpackers before too.
At that point, I also got an offer to work in Victoria from my old boss of another commercial building company. Working in Victoria sounded good to me at the time and that way I could stick around for the long-term, but I still liked to travel. So I looked at the hostel as a way of travelling without travelling and also as a way of giving back the experiences that I’ve had with other people, not only in my own country but in my very own hometown.
Of course, there’s also the financial side of things as well, it was an opportunity to invest my money and I saw it as a good deal. As for the overheads, I knew that running a small hostel of twenty-four beds would be quite simple. I sort of based this around how simplistic the expectations are of the hostels here in Australia as compared to Europe.
Also If you compare a small hostel to a motel, there would be quite a bit of difference in your overheads, like instead of cleaning every bathroom for every room and making every bed, compared to only cleaning communal amenity areas.
What did you envision while starting the hostel?
When I bought the building, it was very dilapidated and run down. The hostel on this property before I got it didn’t have a really good reputation and there was a lot of junk everywhere.
I wasn’t really buying a business as such, I was basically buying the building that already had bunk beds and I’ve gradually built a business out of it. It used to get backpackers that would stay long term and were a completely different sort of clientele.
I think the biggest way I turned it around was by making my own accounts with Hostelworld and booking.com as I didn’t want to take any bad reviews from previous times; that was number one. Also from staying in a lot of hostels, working in two major hostels chains in Europe and having six months of experience in Lisbon where the hostel industry standards is one of the highest in the world.
João, owner of the Destination Hostels has created quite a high standard as well. It was definitely not the image of what I knew of a hostel before I travelled overseas; I was sleeping in a proper bed with quality mattresses as opposed to staying in a hostel in Australia, where you sleep on a bed and you’re not expecting it to be that comfortable.
So from my travel experience and working in hostels, I realised that there are really just a few key points, and once you get those basics right or you start working toward those points, you’re basically halfway there —
- Clean beds for starters which is one of the most important because that’s what people are there for at the end of the day.
I kept the memory foam mattresses for the first summer after I bought it because I didn’t have a lot of money to start with after buying the property.
I bought these white mattress protection covers from Kmart as they were cheap and I suppose that sort of lifted the profile immediately just by looking at them that they were clean.
- Having clean facilities and general cleanliness. So as much as you can work with what you’ve got and put in the effort to make it look clean and to smell clean, then that goes a long way.
- Hot water is another major one and I didn’t get that from the hostel industry, I mainly got that from my background in the motel industry. So hot water is important no matter what type of accommodation you’re providing.
- For backpackers, another essential requirement is the internet which is becoming more and more important. So that’s something I got up and running before I opened it.
As for a PMS, when I worked at Lisbon Destination Hostel, they used Backpackers Online as a booking system and when I looked it up I found out it was free through Hostelworld. So I actually got that quite early on as well; purely because it was a system that I worked with before and it seemed to work well for bigger hostels and I was only a small hostel. It came at the right price and it was easy to teach someone as well.
The different people that I have employed during summers have also contributed their piece to growing the business by adding their own touches. And since being here and starting to grow the business full time, I have actually engaged with a lot of the guests to help grow the business as well.
The biggest change with the whole operation was when I employed an English girl (Hannah) in the second summer, she bought the thoughtful feminine touches. She bought small things like hand towels, soaps for washing hands, a presentable soap dispenser and little signs to show people where they are going, like signs for the toilet and shower, and the reception.
Another person that I hired, Andre, who I worked with and travelled Europe with, brought in the social hostel atmosphere more than anything else. He was very good at engaging with guests which I learnt from him.
He was a bit like me, a young single male, so that gives you the perspective that my expectations of hostel comforts are pretty basic, keeping in mind that my biggest clientele pre-COVID was probably 18–25-year-old European females. So I was open to suggestions as I had no idea what a young European female was expecting.
Were there any initial challenges while starting up?
I came here from Melbourne in 2019 to run the business full time. Prior to this, I had a bit of a hurdle because obviously, you can only build the business so much from three hours away while you’re working a full-time job.
I was working in Melbourne from Monday to Saturday, then I would drive down to Apollo bay on Saturday night and clean up the hostel on Sunday morning to give whoever was working here a day off or at least a morning off and then pay them and drive back to Melbourne. So this was sort of a backburner and it was very hard to build the business to where I wanted to get it to.
The main thing for me was to renovate the rooms as they were very run down and dirty looking. So I basically renovated each room at a time. The first 12 months while the other guys were working here, I managed to renovate two rooms, and once I came here full time I renovated the other ones too. Fortunately, by the time I had it opened full-time I had them all up and running. So I painted all the rooms freshly white, painted the ceilings and in some cases re-plastered the walls and painted all the beds. One wall in each room is painted a different colour so they are not all clinically white.
During the initial phase, I attended the hostel skill conference in Copenhagen to get some ideas for the business like using the front desk master system which replaced BPO.
I also met Eva there, from Long story short hostel in Olomouc Czech Republic and I visited her hostel as well, because of her background she was familiar with the female market and I knew this was the market that I had and I needed some knowledge on that. Because I was eventually going to renovate and she gave me a lot of insight into what females look for in an amenities block.
Pricing is a tricky thing, especially during a pandemic. How has pricing been affected in Australia?
The topic of pricing is really interesting because unlike the rest of the world, post-Covid prices have actually gone through the roof in Australia. What’s actually driven the prices up in Australia as a whole and not just in the hostel game is that people are expecting and wanting to pay higher prices as opposed to lower price and this is coming directly from the information centre at Apollo Bay. This, I believe, has also got to do with the stimulus package the government has put out there and the amount of money that has been pumped in externally to keep not just the economy afloat, but also the Tourism sector.
However, I think there are a number of reasons why they are ready to pay higher prices. Number one, Job-keeper and Jobseeker (Government stimulus packages) which allowed money to keep pumping in and that increased people's spending capacity. In a lot of cases peoples wages were going up because it was not actually coming out of the employers pocket it was coming out of the government’s pocket.
Secondly, a lot of people have started working from home so if you think about it, a lot of expenditure has reduced when working from home like commuting to work, parking fees, buying lunch and possibly a few coffees and going out for drinks after work. It then adds up and all of a sudden these people realise that they have a lot more disposable income compared to what they had.
Lastly, the property prices have gone high in Apollo bay and the demand is extraordinary which has factored in the driving up of prices in accommodation. Another thing I learnt from the information centre is that they are expecting to pay more because they think they are getting a better product, they (the customer) have this mindset that since they now have this extra money that they can burn it on something that looks like it's worth a lot.
How is it like travelling in Australia post-pandemic? And what kind of travellers are you getting post-pandemic?
Post-Covid, Western Australia has a lot more backpackers as opposed to Victoria.
I have done a bit of a study on where the backpackers are visiting and when I stayed in Dunsborough, Western Australia, I had to actually wait a couple of hours to book a bed because it was so busy. Upon speaking to the owner there he said they’ve been booked out since the start of Covid; that’s over a year ago! Travellers and backpackers are staying clear of visiting Victoria because of constantly changing restrictions (which literally happens on an hourly basis) and the uncertainty around it.
This uncertainty is not good for the backpackers especially on a working holiday visa because they are trying to find jobs and also they have travelled to experience the other side of the world. States like Western Australia provide that opportunity because number one - they didn’t have any restrictions since June last year and number two - there’s a lot of farm work over there.
As a majority, over the Christmas/ new year period, we were receiving older backpackers in the 25 to 30 years age bracket, who are on their working holiday visas or other internationals that have been in Australia a while and are no longer backpackers. We had a lot of Dutch coming in pre-COVID although probably more South American cultures post COVID. Most of the backpackers came in during Christmas but after the holidays there was literally nobody.
Lastly, what is your favourite part about running a hostel?
That’s a hard question for anyone that owns a hostel and my answer would probably sound generic but it’s meeting all the different people, learning a bit about their culture and experiencing everybody vibe; it’s like travelling without travelling.
My personal motivation to travel is to see and experience another culture. This might sound a bit snobbish but I don’t travel internationally to see the landscapes because I come from a country that has amazing landscapes that are pretty hard to beat. I get a lot out of other people’s cultures though, like their language and food and that’s what I got out of Portugal as well because they hired local people. When you’re backpacking sometimes it’s hard to meet local people because you only meet other backpackers and they are doing the same as you, so you sort of guess other people’s cultures.
Here at the hostel, I don’t feel like an owner, I feel like another guest, I feel like I’m part of a shared house and it's different people every day.
The reason why I involve outsiders in this business is because you’re not the person you’re marketing to. Of course, it’s your hostel but not everybody is the same and we’re dealing with a lot of cultures and while catering to all these cultures you need to understand what they’re going to be looking for.
My logo was actually designed by one of my friends whom I went to preschool with. He ended up doing six concept designs of the logo from the information I gave him. For the next two weeks, I asked almost every guest about which logo they preferred and there was a lot of feedback. All the comments and feedback contributed to the logo we have now. So that’s the unique part about how this business is developed individually.
People would gather around a little table in the common area here and play cards and you’ve got 20 people playing cards at midnight and sharing an experience, so that’s where I got the idea of having my logo printed on the playing cards. This way all of a sudden the business has grown and developed a little bit more.
Another example; I designed my bathroom on something that a lady owns in the Czech Republic and that’s because she was a make-up artist and had credibility with young females and that’s my market. She educated me about how when they walk into a bathroom, they want the lighting coming off the mirror to have an even spread of light across their face when they do their makeup. It’s a nice thing to do for them and also it's important for the success of your business.
It feels like I’m managing the building of the business and everyone around me is building up this business as they come through and they might not even know because some just stay one night, but all these people have contributed in their own little way.
