Hi. Firstly, allow me to introduce my wife (Rebecca) and myself (Tony) who manage this hostel. As far as we can tell, we are the only hostel in the world 100% owned by a volunteer Surf Life Saving Club (in our case, the Port Campbell Surf Life Saving Club), which has been the way it is since the PCSLC first offered backpacker styled accommodation from the property way back in the mid 1980s.

This hostel underwent a complete ground-up reconstruction that was finished in October 2009, and Bec and I have managed it since April, 2010. Since then we have hosted many tens of thousands of guests, and believe we have developed a very solid appreciation of the wants and desires carried by our predominant target market: those (predominately) independent travellers who, as classified by Tourism Australia, are ‘core backpackers’.

So, based on what both of us have seen in our interactions with thousands of our guests, day after day, we are really, really comfortable in saying that most of the guests from our target market enjoy a very, very favourable stay within the walls of our humble home. (Indeed, if the 35 TripAdvisor reviews listed about the hostel when we prepared this response offer any sort of guideline, 83% (29) reviews rate us as either “Excellent” (21 reviews) or “Very good” (8 reviews). Your review is the only one that rates us as “Poor”).

We encourage all TA readers to take a look at what other TA reviewers have had to say about us. For instance, ‘mcg88’ on the 27th January this year started with ‘Cleaner than a hospital’. (And we can see the irony with that, given that a hospital was what you compared us to). ‘Lilaleni’ back in mid-November last year titled their review as “Simple, freshly renovated, sparkling clean”. And ‘Zuyga’, way back in April last year offered a simple review titled “clean and basic equipped”. (We strongly encourage you to read our response to Zuyga’s review, as well).

And the list goes on.

Sure, while it is clear that not everyone is 100% happy we feel that, for the most part we do a really, really good job of delivering what it is we set out to deliver: an excellent “no-frills” budget accommodation experience for backpackers (or, travellers who are happy to be categorised as such) in a sparklingly clean hostel located in a tiny coastal village on one of Australia’s iconic coastal touring routes.

But, as we hinted at above, there is always a segment of patrons whose experience – for whatever reason - did not meet their expectations. Unfortunately, it seems you fall into that category.

While acknowledging the points in your review, we believe it is only fair to clarify a few of the very important aspects of how we run our business.

Firstly - as we touched on above - we believe we run a very, very good 86-bed hostel that caters very well for the needs, wants and desires of our principle target market: backpackers. To help underscore that comment, we invite you to see how we shape up as portrayed through the hundreds of independent reviews and ratings left by guests who booked their stay in the hostel on some of the world’s most popular on-line hostel booking sites. (Per TA’s ‘Management Response’ processes we are not permitted to name those sites here. However, anyone familiar with the most popular hostel and backpacker booking sites will very quickly determine what sites they are). While not everyone is 100% happy, 100% of the time, we consistently gain ratings that rank us among the top hostels in both Australia and New Zealand... not too bad, you would think, for a Mum and Dad operation.

What we do not attempt to provide is an accommodation experience to match what we both feel are the more discerning expectation set of travellers who would normally find themselves accommodated in lodgings such as a motel (and, importantly, are prepared to pay for those levels of service delivery). We leave the provision of that experience to the motels in Port Campbell. They don’t attempt to cater to and for our market, and we don’t attempt to cater for their market.

Secondly, we hope you can understand that how we operate the hostel has been predominately shaped by the peculiar wants, needs, desires and - in many instances - behaviour of our ‘usual’ backpacker guests, 97% of whom only stay for one night as part of their experience while on their Great Ocean Road road-trip.

You mention that we are set up to cater for groups. Sure! We can sleep 86 guests, so have set up the hostel with internal infrastructure to cater for the potential consumption pressures that that amount of people can present. They normally all tend to arrive around the same time... prepare a meal around the same time... shower at around the same time... (we’re sure you get the message). To be fair, if we were to eliminate some of that infrastructure we feel we could then find ourselves facing similar comments as those you passed in your review of Singapore’s Beary Good Hostel: “Beary small but Friendly”. In that, it appears that an otherwise really good hostel suffers from what appear to be common spaces that are nowhere near large enough to cater for the number of guests the Beary Good Hostel can host.

And yes, on occasion we have suffered through some very bad experiences where a small minority of guests have shown complete and utter disregard for the welfare and interests of other guests with drunken, anti-social, unruly and intolerably loud behaviour. Sure: while that outcome has only ever been the result of the behaviour of a very, very small minority of guests (we are sure anybody reading this will know the sort of behaviour we mean), we are responsible for managing a hostel that can sleep 86 people under our roof on any given night, in a facility with a very high turn-over of guests. Therefore, we face the very real prospect of “dealing” with that sort of unruly behaviour from a brand new set of guests each and every night. To that end, we have developed systems that have, so far, allowed the vast majority of our guests to enjoy a comfortable stay without their experience being shattered as a result of the inconsiderate actions of what always boils down to that ‘small minority’ we both allude to.
So, those peculiar “rules” you mention are there for very, very good reasons: let the majority enjoy our hostel without their stay being destroyed by an inconsiderate minority.

And thirdly, both of us believe that if any of our guests have problems or issues with the manner the hostel is being operated, we both feel we are (normally) eminently approachable and more than willing to engage in conversations about whatever it is that may be bugging our guests. As the saying goes, we can only fix those things we are told about.
In this case, it was not until we read your review that we had any indication that you had experienced any sort of issue with your stay, to which we simply ask: why did you not make any effort at all to catch up with us when you were here, and raise your concerns with us, face-to-face? Not only do we live in the hostel (with our two year old daughter), you stayed for two nights, so we presume you could have found some time to come and talk to us, at some point. It is a little disconcerting to find that what you did find the time to do, was prepare a review close to 750 words in length that, for the most part, paints our business in a very, very poor light... without first making any attempt either of us can recall to raise any of the concerns you wrote about, with us.

However, having said all that - perhaps it simply appropriate to call upon the final few words uttered by that famous Aussie outlaw Ned Kelly in Melbourne, 1880... “Such is life”.