Safestay runs city-centre hostels across Europe, where one room can be sold as a dorm bed, a female-only dorm and a private room on the same night. With PricePoint, the group put one automated pricing engine live across 16 hostels in under two months, and sold 10.5% more room nights in its first year.
16 Hostels: live on PricePoint across 11 countries
57 days: from first go-live to full portfolio
+10.5% more room nights sold in year one across seven hostels
Up to +17.1%: RevPAR growth in year one (Barcelona Passeig de Gràcia)
Company: Safestay — hostels and hotels in European city centres
Portfolio: Dorm beds and private rooms in cities including London, Barcelona, Madrid, Prague, Warsaw, Brussels, Lisbon, Pisa and Athens
Challenge: Pricing shared, multi-category inventory across many countries, currencies and event calendars
Solution: PricePoint automated pricing, with a dedicated onboarding team and ongoing support
PMS: Cloudbeds
On PricePoint since: March 2023
Hostel pricing is harder than hotel pricing. A Safestay room isn't one product: the same beds can be sold as a mixed dorm, a female-only dorm or a private room, and each of those appears as its own category on every booking channel. In a 2025 working session, Safestay's commercial team described properties where a single physical room is marketed under many virtual categories at once.
Multiply that across hostels in more than ten countries, each with its own currency, its own competitors and its own calendar of festivals, concerts and long weekends, and keeping every price right becomes a property-by-property problem.
From the first weeks of the trial, Safestay's commercial team was clear about how they would judge a pricing system: not by how many bookings came in on a given day, but by how each property performed on its stay dates against its KPI targets.
"We are more looking at how the property is performing on stay dates against targets for key KPIs. All very good so far." — Mario Di Candido, Head of Commercial, Safestay
They also needed a system that respected local knowledge. Before go-live, Safestay's commercial lead sent PricePoint city-by-city event calendars, from Wimbledon and Notting Hill Carnival in London to Christmas markets in Vienna and long weekends in Warsaw, so each property's pricing would reflect the demand its team already knew was coming. And they needed it to scale: the goal was the whole portfolio, not a pilot that stayed a pilot.
PricePoint set up each property from its own history: room groupings that reflect how Safestay's beds are actually sold, starting rates based on the previous year's ADR, a hand-picked competitor set for every city, and the local events calendar.
The first three hostels, in London, Prague and Vienna, went live on 16 March 2023. Within two weeks, Safestay asked to bring York, Pisa and Berlin on next, and soon after asked for the remaining properties to be set up in one go. By 12 May 2023, 16 hostels were live.
"I am really pleased with the system so far" — Mario Di Candido, Head of Commercial, Safestay, two weeks after go-live
Across the seven hostels with a full year of data before go-live, Safestay sold 382,986 room nights in its first year on PricePoint, up from 346,447 the year before: 36,539 more nights, or +10.5%.
The biggest gains came from filling more beds. At Barcelona Passeig de Gràcia, room nights rose 21.2% and RevPAR rose from €14.33 to €16.78. At London Kensington Holland Park, room nights rose 17.3% and RevPAR from £13.37 to £14.95. Together, the three strongest properties sold 35,362 more nights (+18.7%) than the year before.
The first-year change in room revenue at Barcelona Passeig de Gràcia was +€478,457, and +£260,878 at Holland Park, with capacity unchanged at both.
A pricing system has to keep working when the business around it changes. In January 2025, Safestay moved its whole portfolio to a new PMS, Cloudbeds. PricePoint re-launched every property on the new system in 15 days, between 16 and 30 January 2025, and support handled the room mapping and setup changes that followed. Across 51 support tickets since late 2024, the median time to a first reply was 2.6 hours.
As Safestay's needs grew, so did what PricePoint delivered: portfolio reporting, and automated daily pickup reports sent to Safestay's leadership for every property.
"we talked about the Yield Management / Pricing platform we successfully used for a number of year now: PricePoint." — Peter Zielke, Safestay plc
Safestay and PricePoint are now piloting a new way of counting occupancy at Safestay Bratislava, based on the physical beds actually booked rather than on virtual room categories. For a hostel group, that is the difference between pricing what the channels show and pricing what the building really holds — and the next step in a partnership that is now in its fourth year.
