7 YEARS OF HOSTEL COLONIAL

February ends, the month on which our “Hostel Colonial” is 7 years old. The seventh year crisis. Good thing and bad things happened. I wouldn’t say this year was a great year, just a period of transition to a better one. The end of 2010 was chaotic, Buenos Aires reached historic levels of temperature and the enterprises in charge of providing the electric service collapsed (in our case, #Edesur) and dragged us into their disaster. We worked for 39 days without an electric generator down and alternating all the time. This had terrible consequences as: the water pumps burned as well as air conditioning equipment, TV sets and computers. We had to relocate our guests in other hostels in the middle of the high season with full occupation. Few who stayed were offered full board, including lunch and dinner in some of the restaurants we run (Almacén Suipacha and Parrilla El Gaucho, in this occasion, because other place we run had the same electric problems as the Hostel).

Our strong presence on the Internet (blogs, social networks, etc.) compels us permanently to an exercise of evaluation which we transfer to management. Sometimes -we must admit- we fail. Some prefer to hide their mistakes, we don’t.

A couple of days ago I was in Brazil (I’m in Brazil right now), when I read this post of one of our guests, a Brazilian girl, Luciana Coelho Mota http://garotinharuiva.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/hostel-colonial-buenos-aires-fatos/. I agree in many things she points (discussions in front of the guests are absurd), but I would like to clear some others. In fact, I got in touch with her (@LuRussa) through Twitter and I told her I’d be writing this post.

Here’s her answer.


I’m convinced that -besides being an accommodation service- our commercial goal has always been honesty and transparence with our guests. A true trade mark in the construction of “Hostel Colonial Buenos Aires” brand. Most of them are nowadays great friends of ours.

As usual, we try to act according to problem we face. We do so with the thousands of people who eat on our restaurants, the hundreds of people who stay in our Hostel and the people working with us (around 250) in our different business units. Apologies are useless when facing the facts but, in this case, we fell like we have to give you an excuse for the action of someone else (service providers, technicians, a collapsed area). We believe that in this occasion, things are different and it’s good to clear things up to avoid the damage of our Hostel’s image in the near future.

In seven years we have become the home of hundreds of Argentine, Brazilian, Israeli, American, British, French, Spanish, Chilean, Uruguayan, Japanese, Chinese, Croatian, German, Italian and Greek friends, among other. To become “THE HOME” of someone is the best balance we can make in this 7 years. Gracias, Obrigado, Χάρη, Thank You, Merci, Arigato, Xie Xie, Grazie, Dank, Hvala, תודה

There are great changes ahead in 2011: a full renovation of our installations and services which I’ll be telling you about next week.

Best, Jorge (George)