While the average occupancy at Hostelling International youth hostels is 36% in France, 52.3% in the United Kingdom and 63% in the United States, this result hides a certain disparity between regions and big cities where occupancy often surpasses 80%. In Paris, the Jules Ferry Youth Hostel of the FUAJ has no vacancies almost every any given day. Opened recently, St Christopher’s Inn in Paris already posts occupancy at 95%, while its parent the Beds & Bars group, has an overall average occupancy of 87%. Such impressive levels alone explain why the most ambitious players concentrate their development strategies in major European cities (see below). The same strategy has also been adopted by the chain Che Lagarto Hostels, which is present in most South American tourism capitals.Offering dormitories, double, triple and quadruple rooms, youth hostels play on the flexibility of their inventories and lengths of stay to optimize results. Considering the market, for their distribution strategy, Internet clearly holds an increasingly important share. Hostelling International successfully converted its members to this new source of clientele. “Property directors, who alone control the occupancy of their hostels, must be good professionals, playing on allotments put online,” explains Edith Arnoult-Brill, director of the IYHF. But hostels’ profits are not just derived from the volume of reservations but also from the sale of annexed products and, above all, from the incontrovertible bar. A meeting place for sharing experiences and good deals between “routards”, the bar is an important source of revenues for operators. All Beds & Bars incorporate the signature bar Belushi’s, which contributes to making the average spending of each guest reach 62.50€ for a length of stay of 2.5 days. A&O (Germany)The group A&O juggles two scenarios with a portfolio made up mostly of mixed hotel-hostel properties, with both dormitories and very...