The hostel owner’s guide

Houstel.pk is two things in one account: a free advert that puts your hostel in front of people searching for a room, and software that runs the hostel once they move in.

Signing up takes two short steps and about a minute. You need a name, an email address, a phone number and the name of your hostel.

Your hostel profile is what people see before they call you. Fill it in once, properly, and it works for you every day after that.

Every new hostel is checked by our team before it appears publicly. Approval is only half of it. There are five things that must all be true before your advert shows on Houstel.pk.

Everything in Houstel.pk sits on top of your room list: availability, rent, the map, your public advert. It is worth half an hour to get right.

Photos do more for your enquiries than any other single thing on your listing. A hostel with no photos does not appear publicly at all.

You can run a hostel of up to 20 living residents free, for as long as you like. Above that you need a plan, and every plan starts with a 30-day free trial.

A resident is a person; a booking is that person in a bed, for a period, at a rent. Adding someone and giving them a bed are two separate steps, and that separation is what lets people move rooms without losing their history.

Every rupee a resident hands you gets recorded once, against the month it pays for. Do that and the dashboard, the dues list and the receipts all take care of themselves.

The hostel decides when rent is due and how much lateness it tolerates. Once you have set that, the system can chase quietly on your behalf instead of you making the same call twenty times a month.

Some of the money in your drawer is not income. It is money you are holding and will one day give back. Houstel.pk keeps that money separate so your profit figure stays honest.

Rent in, costs out, what is left. Record your bills as you pay them and the profit figure on your dashboard is real rather than a guess at the end of the month.

If you serve food, publish the week's menu once and your residents stop asking. You also choose whether mess is part of the rent or billed on top.

The dashboard answers “how is the hostel doing right now”. The reports answer “what happened, and is it getting better or worse”.

When somebody on Houstel.pk is interested in your hostel, it arrives here. Speed matters more than anything else on this page, because the hostel that replies first usually gets the resident.

Reviews are the single thing a stranger trusts most about your hostel. You cannot write them, but you can ask for them and you can answer them.

Give your warden and manager their own logins instead of sharing yours. You decide what each of them can open, and you can see who did what.

Four ways to reach people, each for a different job: chat for conversations, the notice board for announcements, WhatsApp and email for things that must not be missed, and alerts to tell you something needs attention.

Your residents get their own login. It shows them their room, their rent and their receipts, and nothing about anybody else.

Post the job on Houstel.pk, look through people who have already put their name down for hostel work, and keep the salary of whoever you hire in the same place as the rest of your costs.

If something is not working or not clear, there are three ways to reach a person, and one of them is WhatsApp.