From Cloudbeds to a Hostel PMS
Cloudbeds is good software for a business that sells rooms. If most of your revenue is bunks in shared dorms, you've probably built a layer of workarounds on top of it without noticing. Here's how to tell whether it's time to move, and how to do it without losing a booking.
Published: 6 September 2026 - 6-minute read
Plenty of hostels run on Cloudbeds, and plenty run well. It's a serious platform with a large integration marketplace, and for a property that's mostly private rooms with a couple of dorms, it can be the right call. This page isn't a takedown.
It's for the other kind of hostel: the one where most of the beds are in dorms, groups reshuffle weekly, and the team has quietly learned to translate everything the software says about rooms into what they actually sell. If that's you, the switch is more straightforward than you'd expect, and the data comes with you.
Give Cloudbeds its due
Cloudbeds does the platform job well, and it's fair to say so before listing what it doesn't do. If you leave, leave for the right reasons.
- The marketplace is real. A few hundred integrations, from payment processors to revenue tools. If your operation leans on three or four specialist add-ons, check they exist elsewhere before you move.
- Hybrid properties fit it. A place that's mostly private rooms with a dorm or two is close enough to a hotel that hotel-shaped software rarely pinches.
- It scales. Multi-property groups, several currencies, a big team with different roles. It was built for that size of operation, and it shows.
Where a dorm-heavy hostel starts working around it
The frictions are small on their own. They add up because the team compensates for them by hand, every shift.
- The model underneath is the room. Cloudbeds can sell a dorm bed, but the structure it's built on is a room, and that's where operators tell us the workarounds begin: moving a guest between bunks, holding beds for a group across two dorms, keeping a female-only dorm female-only on a busy night. bed-level inventory is the whole reason a hostel PMS exists.
- A price you can't see up front. Cloudbeds doesn't publish pricing; you get a quote after a call, and add-ons are priced on top. HostelMate publishes $19 and $45 a month, and that's the number. The figures Cloudbeds quoted us are on the side-by-side comparison, so you can hold both against your current invoice.
- Setup and training are sized for hotels. Onboarding a hotel-grade platform takes weeks, and every new front-desk hire learns a hotel's screens before they can sell a bunk. In a hostel where staff turn over each season, that cost repeats.
- The reports answer a hotel's question. Occupancy and rate per room tell you little when the room is ten beds at three prices. Revenue per bed, which dorm layout earns most, what a group did to the mix: that becomes a spreadsheet job on top of the export.
- Hostelworld is one channel among many. For a hotel, fine. For a hostel it's often the biggest channel, and it deserves first-class treatment: deposits, group bookings, and availability that stays at the bed instead of getting rounded to a room.
The cost isn't the subscription. It's the translation layer.
When you price a switch, the subscription is the easy line. The expensive one is the hours your team spends translating: beds into rooms for the software, rooms back into beds for the guest at the desk, and both into something a spreadsheet can report on.
That layer is invisible on an invoice and very visible at 11 p.m. on a Friday with a group of twelve at the door. A hostel PMS removes it by using the bed as the native unit, so nobody has to translate anything.
How to switch without losing a booking
The order matters more than the speed. Done in this sequence, nothing dramatic happens.
- 01
Read your Cloudbeds contract first.
The notice period is usually the longest item on the whole timeline, and it sets your go-live date more than anything technical does.
- 02
Export everything it will give you.
Reservations (the future ones matter most), guest profiles, room types and rates. Do it while your subscription is alive, and keep the raw files as your archive whatever ends up imported.
- 03
Send the files as they are.
Email them to contact@hostelmate.co. No reformatting, no renamed columns. A person reviews them before anything is loaded and tells you if something won't come across cleanly. Small exports are usually loaded within the hour; a full property with history, within the day.
- 04
Map the beds once, properly.
Mixed dorms, female-only, privates, whole-room bookings. This is where the room structure gets rebuilt as real dorm beds, and it's the step that pays back every day afterwards.
- 05
Remap channels one at a time.
Booking.com, Hostelworld, Airbnb: move one, watch bookings flow for a day, move the next. Listings, reviews and ranking don't change. how PMS data migration works covers what imports and how.
What changes on day one, and what doesn't
What changes: the calendar shows beds, not rooms pretending to be beds. Moving a guest is a drag, not a room-move form. Group holds and dorm rules are settings, not staff memory. And the invoice is a number you can read on a public page.
What doesn't: your OTA listings, reviews and ranking. Your guests. Your pricing strategy, if it was working. And your history, which you exported in step two and keep either way.
Ready to Manageyour dream Hostel?
Moving off Cloudbeds: the questions we actually get
Yes. Cloudbeds lets you export reservations and guest data, and those files map closely to how HostelMate stores the same information, which makes this one of the more straightforward moves. Export while your subscription is still active, and keep the raw files regardless of what gets imported.
Once the export files are in, the import itself is usually done within the day, often within the hour for a smaller property. Remapping channels one at a time adds a few days. The longest item is normally the notice period in your Cloudbeds contract, so read that first and plan a quiet week around it.
Yes. Channels are moved one at a time and stay live throughout; a booking made mid-move lands in whichever system that channel is connected to at that moment. Nothing goes dark, and your listings, reviews and ranking are untouched.
HostelMate is $19 or $45 a month, published on the pricing page, with no commission on any booking. Cloudbeds doesn't publish a price; you're quoted after a call. The figures Cloudbeds quoted us are on the comparison page, so you can do the division per bed against your own invoice.
When the dorm is a side line rather than the business: mostly private rooms, a shared room or two, and an operation that already depends on specialist integrations from the Cloudbeds marketplace. In that shape, hotel-first software rarely pinches, and a move buys you little.
If the dorm is the business, the software should count beds. When you are ready, the move is deliberately unglamorous: export what Cloudbeds will give you, email it to contact@hostelmate.co as it is, and get the beds mapped properly once. Still weighing it up? the alternatives, priced side by side covers eight systems, and the overview of switching systems compares the four starting points.