behind the counter x Yash Bohra
Jack of all trades and master of all too! Yash Bohra, Founder & CEO of Locomo World and The Bay Crawl, and Co-Founder of I-create and Basti Backpackers is truly multi-talented! Not only is he one of the most ambitious entrepreneurs, but he is also a sound engineer and has completed a bachelor’s degree in Mass Media and Advertising. Yash is also a big animal welfare supporter. This week at behind the counter, we are thrilled to chat with Yash about the future of hostels and the various different ways a hostel can adapt and re-purpose the business post-pandemic.
How did your hostel journey begin? and what does a ‘hostel’ mean to you?
Fortunately for me, my entire family loves to travel! We’ve always been that typical family that takes a holiday together every once in a year during the summer. During our stay at hotels, the hospitality and the people behind the counter always intrigued me. I was very curious about how it all works. I was introduced to the concept of a hostel by one of my best friend, who was always encouraged by his father to travel young. He had a YHAI membership, and he travelled around the world and stayed in different hostels. He always came back with the most interesting stories of the hostels; the bunk beds and all the amazing people he met during his travels! Back then, a hostel as an accommodation category for travellers was not very popular in India, but the idea struck a chord and lingered with me over the years.
I remember attending my graduate classes, sitting on the last bench researching hostels and noting things down in a tiny notebook! I realised there weren’t too many hostels in India, even though there was an enormous market for it. For the next 2–3 years, I was just putting things in the notebook; how hostels operate, how the bed pricing is determined, the staff, the activities, the interactions, the pricing, everything really! Soon hostels like Zostel and Moustache started popping up in the market, and that made me want to learn more about hostels
The final year of my graduation, I took a two-day solo trip to Udaipur and stayed at the Bunkyard Hostel. It is still one of the best properties I’ve ever stayed at. The moment I arrived, I realised I already made a friend from France, one from England and two from Australia! We would hang out together, have a few beers and explore the city together. It blew me away by how easy it was to talk to people and how understanding they were. And since I happen to be from Rajasthan, I was able to share all the history and culture of the city with my newfound friends.
So I came back with even more confidence in the hostel concept, and I was convinced that I would like to open one of my own. However, you should know that I’m passionate about two things- music and travel. I’m also a sound engineer. So after graduation, I thought I’ll give music a shot and worked in a recording studio for the first six months. It turned out to be the most boring half year of my life. I have nothing against those who enjoy it; I love music and I love playing with machines, but I knew I couldn’t sit between four walls for hours at a stretch; it works as a hobby for me, but definitely not as a profession!
October 2016 was when I travelled to Manali in North India to volunteer at a hostel for 20 days. I don’t think the owner was very passionate about it; it was just business. I was quite disappointed with the experience because I went with a mindset to learn. So I looked up other hostels and in November, I volunteered at the Moustache hostel in Jaipur. I ended up volunteering for five months and I’ll give the founder’s a lot of credit for that because I learnt a lot from them. I worked at different properties of Moustache as well; Jaipur, Agra, Jaisalmer, Udaipur. I was clear from the start that I wanted to start a hostel of my own. I even had the perfect property for it, a family-owned 120-year-old heritage property in Jodhpur! I did end up opening a hostel there, Locomo Hostel Jodhpur, but that wasn’t my first hostel.
When I got back to Mumbai, there weren’t any hostels in Mumbai either. Since my family and I lived there, I decided to start one there first. I visited Bombay Backpackers where I worked under them for a week before they realised I was very serious about starting my own hostel. They offered a partnership, and that’s how Basti Backpackers, our first hostel, opened on June 2017 and then and then and then!
Hostels to me are all about the community and the sense of belonging. Most of the people you meet at hostels are like-minded people. It’s a place where things like age, nationality or religion don’t matter. Everybody’s accepted and celebrated! It’s nice to meet people in the real world instead of on the internet, and these are people you’d otherwise never meet in your regular life! I’ve been so inspired by the community vibe for the past few months that we are now working on another startup and a few brand extensions which revolve around building a community.
Tell us more about the brand extensions and building the community?
In the past couple of years, many people with properties approached me who were interested in franchising the Locomo brand. Some of these properties are remote, some are offbeat, and some are in cities with no tourists. I didn’t want to miss out on any opportunities! It got me thinking, so during this downtime (thanks to the pandemic), I’ve been working on a few brand extensions and concepts under the Locomo brand umbrella. This way, if I am approached for a partnership or collaboration, I’ll have something to plug in there.
The brand extensions currently in place are The Bay Crawl; a nightlife company where we organise pub crawls in a best-standardised way for our backpacker guests, locals and young expatriates. We take care of the logistics, safety, entry to bars and access to VIP areas. We have tied-up with the best of bars and hostels in the city and we give them the best deal and discounts. LoColiving is a month-long stay option for our guests, which has been recently announced in our properties. Another concept is the Locomo Kitchen, branding our existing hostel cafes and restaurants and offering food delivery via 3rd party apps. LocoWork is a Co-working plug-in concept within the existing properties where we will have a separate Co-working space area for locals and guests. The startup project I’ve been working on is Locostays, which is an off-beat farm stay concept. We have two properties coming up for Locostays, one in Nashik and another in Rajasthan. I cannot call it a hostel obviously, because a hostel has a different personality and standards. We hope to have all the brand extensions active by February -March 2021.
LocoExist is another brand extension, which is actually more of a non for profit project. During the pandemic, there were a lot of animals; pets and otherwise that were abandoned and left to fend on their own. I’m a huge animal lover and I always wanted to do more for them, and this felt like the perfect time to do it. After running hostels for a while now, I wanted to utilise my skills in raising funds for animals in need. But I didn't want to just start a donation, so I designed some basic merchandise like t-shirts, masks and shopping bags (to begin with) and I donate the funds collected to independent feeders in different cities. We raised seventy-thousand-rupees within a week of running the campaign! When our properties open up for business in full swing again, we’ll have the merchandise available at the properties too.
I envision the Locomo brand as a Youth Lifestyle Brand, so we also want to enter the lifestyle space where the younger target market and millennials are proud to be associated with it. Since we already have the brand extensions ready, we want to be able to cover all their travel and lifestyle requirements. Locomo aspires to be one of the successful young brands of India!
How do you make sure your guests have the best experience?
The only way to ensure that is to tie-up with the right people in the industry and try your best to hire the right staff who would truly enjoy what they do and want to learn from it.
At Locomo Mumbai hostel, my mother hosts cooking classes, Hindi classes, India survival classes, and sometimes traditional saree draping classes! And I know no-one can do these things better than a mother, and of course, she always has the best intentions for me. The guests always love her warm personality and she loves making sure they have the best experience! So the only way to ensure your guests have the best experience is to be involved yourself, or your mother (haha), or someone you know personally and trust that they truly enjoy what they do and know how to have fun doing it. One of my old friends, Arpan, has a company called Bombay walks, he’s extremely passionate about Mumbai and he conducts all the walks himself. Even though the company is only a year old, I only send my guests to him rather than larger well-know companies who see our guests as money-making machines. I have been approached by other companies that can tempt you with more profits, but I rather not, because it makes little sense to make profits at the cost of causing an unpleasant experience to your guests. As hostel owners, we always must make the choice to enhance guest experiences whenever we have the chance to.
What are the biggest COVID-19 challenges you are currently facing?
The only challenges I have faced personally are sometimes in cooking and sometimes in cleaning! Haha. No operational challenges since all three of my hostels have not been functional since March.
I know that if we open the hostels now, we will have a decent amount of guests but not enough to break even. I’ve chosen to take this time to open my mind to newer things. I’m not in a rush to quickly resume my hostels and start making money. Luckily, I’m in a very fortunate position to explore more things rather than spending time and energy on trying to bring guests to come to stay in the hostel when they most likely won’t. So I’m trying to avoid that unnecessary stress and I’m taking it easy at the moment. Hopefully, we will open up in a few months, when there’s enough traction to at least be able to break even.
However, when we do open, we will have two kinds of guests; the ones who’d still be scared and the others who don’t give a f**k! Balancing that out in terms of expectations I believe will be a bit of a challenge after we open. Another challenge is that most of the staff can’t really be themselves under such circumstances. They are also constantly stressing about the possibility of contracting COVID-19.
How do you see yourself re-inventing your business through this crisis?
Kumar Saurabh, Hitesh Chaudhary and I have recently co-founded I-create, a new project in a property in Rishikesh, under a very different concept. It’s an online and offline platform for all kinds of creators; artists, writers, photographers, designers, painters. We want to create a decentralised community where people learn from each other and eventually end up finding work opportunities. The community is going to be plugged in with hostels around the world. Like organising guest speakers every Friday and providing all tools required for the creators in different hostel properties like paints, canvas or tablets. For example, a hostel enthusiastic about music can convert one room into a recording room where music artists can practice and enhance their skills. So we are going to plug in this community idea of decentralised cross-disciplinary learning into hostels. We want to help artists reach their potential and we want to approach big brands like Apple and Tata and make known of our pool of talent and our community, so they can make use of them!
There are two sides of the spectrum to this concept, one’s the founders; people who give the opportunity and the others are the creators, who lend their talents and skills. The property in Rishikesh is for the founders, who can come and stay and make use of the community and resources we already have. Including aspiring founders who want to jump-start their journey for free. It’s like hospitality married to education!
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a luxury hostel?
Do it! Just do it! I can only speak for India since every location has its own unique factors to consider. If you ask me, in India, we have a huge market gap for luxury hostels. The barrier to entry is very low, anybody with zero experience can also open a hostel which is a good thing. If one aspires to do something they should, but that creates a lot of mess in terms of setting standards and benchmarking luxury hostels. Blue Jay Hostel in Rishikesh, according to me, is definitely a benchmark for luxury hostels in India. However, hostel concepts like the Generator hostel and the Freehand hostel need to be brought to India because there are a lot of millennials who make a decent amount of money and don’t mind spending for a more luxury stay while still experiencing the community vibe and hostel life.
