The Japanese fascination with the “La Tomatina” festival in Buñol, which is held on the last Wednesday of August, triggers the occupation of the Purple Nest Hostel in Valencia at the end of each summer. It is one of the dates marked on their calendar, because they know that Japanese, Indians and Australians will book their shared rooms in droves to enjoy this curious war that is an international tourist attraction.
The Cheste Moto GP Grand Prix, between October and November, is also a turning point in the calendar of this establishment located in Plaza Tetuán, a stone’s throw from the old Turia riverbed. Open since 2009, this urban hostel maintains an average occupancy rate of 90%: last year alone some 50,000 people passed through its rooms, most of them young foreigners between the ages of 20 and 35.
“In this last year, the average stay has grown a lot. We hardly have tourists,” explain Marta and Juan, reception manager and operations director of this establishment, which has three other similar centers throughout the city, one of them in the vicinity of the Lonja.
“We look for central places to locate ourselves because the location is essential for customers; just like the common areas, they are important because customers want to interact and meet new people. Here what prevails is the experience,” explains Juan. While talking to La Vanguardia, a guest plays the guitar (owned by the hostel) in the multipurpose room and another girl drinks coffee at the bar. Perhaps in a few days they will be one of those pairs of friends who, after meeting here, have continued to travel to other Spanish cities, with the same accommodation and pace of travel. They explain in the hostel that a lot happens to them, “they get to know each other here and then they follow the route together”.
It is noon and there are few people in the hostel, most of them are walking and taking advantage of the good April weather to discover the city. The urban hostel model is well established in Europe, where a large part of the travelers who stop here come from, although the reception manager explains that since the pandemic national tourism has also increased.
Its affordable prices -20 euros in low season and almost double in high season, as in Fallas- are a good incentive for those who prefer to travel by sharing: “backpackers” are its star travelers and also “the technological ones, who ask us for plugs near the bed and a good Wi-Fi network”, they detail. They argue that more and more families, groups of schoolchildren or athletes and people who telework come and that “they stay here more days than necessary because they like the city and end up looking for a flat,” explains Juan.
They, to set them up, bet on the local product as a claim and try to ensure that there is no shortage of local craft beers in the small bar or a good breakfast of churros with chocolate when the Fallas arrive, their great high season of the year.
“People look for experience,” both note. That is why the common areas are essential in this accommodation model; and on its conditions the Hosbec Hotel Association requests a review. Its general secretary, Nuria Montes, explains that “it is important to modernize its regulation to convert spaces in the center of cities into hostels.” Montes proposes giving a hotel outlet to another business model that is “more adapted to a young client with a chic product but more affordable than hotels and better conditioned than Airbnbs.”
Currently, the Valencian regulation establishes that these accommodations will have common dining and recreation areas in different spaces and that the minimum useful area of ​​the set of common use rooms will be 1.5 square meters per person.
This requirement clashes, in Montes’ opinion, with the current difficulty of finding large properties with these characteristics, thus limiting the growth of a market that has given good results in Valencian tourism, as explained by Alberto Galloso, president of Hosbec Valencia, who details that “they are very profitable and economical products and what is interesting about them is that even many families book for four, because it is cheaper than an apartment or a hotel,” he adds.
Valencian hoteliers recently spoke about this current model with the president and CEO of the New York HANYC Hotel Association, Vijay Dandapani, on a business trip to the city of skyscrapers in which the regional Secretary of Tourism also participated.
Upon his return, Hosbec explained that the city has a network of small hotels that have become obsolete with respect to the evolution of the Big Apple hotel industry and that these open up business opportunities to establish ways of collaborating with Valencian hotel companies. “The idea would be to take our know-how and not for now, but we have seen that it is a very market option,” says Montes.
In the Valencian regional registry there are a total of 30 establishments, 16 in Alicante and another 14 in Valencia, mainly in the city of Valencia. In the first there are 932 beds, in Valencia another 1,169 and none of the businesses belong to a hotel chain. Just as the Purple is in Valencia, the oldest in Alicante is the Hakuna Matata, with 11 seats and located in El Campello. There are no establishments of this type in Castellón.
