HostelBookers Awards for Excellence 2010

The following post is about the 2010 awards but you can read the latest results from HostelBookers Awards for Excellence 2011 including:
Best Hostels in Europe
Best Hostels in North America
Best Hostels in Oceania

Back in November we conducted our biggest ever travel survey to find out what matters to our customers when they are traveling. The thousands of responses made for some interesting reading, but the answers to one question in particular really stood out: ‘What do you consider to be the most important factor when booking accommodation?’

Whilst we already knew that cleanliness, location and price were important factors, we were surprised to learn just how highly you value the opinions of fellow travelers, so we decided to acknowledge this by selecting the winners of our inaugural Awards for Excellence, based solely on the reviews and feedback of our customers.

Split by continent, the awards aim to recognize and reward our top rated hostels from 2009, based on the following six categories: Atmosphere, Cleanliness, Location, Popularity, Value and an Overall rating (Top 3). The three hostels in each continent with the highest customer ratings in each category won the awards for Best Atmosphere, Cleanliness, Best Location and Best Value, while the properties with the most bookings in 2009 picked up the Most Popular awards. Winners of the main prize, the Top 3 properties per continent, received the awards for achieving the highest overall scores across all of our ranking criteria.

In addition to the 6 award categories based on customer ratings, the five properties that we believe provided the best overall service to group booking customers in 2009 received special Group Recognition Awards.

Properties required a minimum number of bookings and reviews to be considered for each award, and, to ensure fairness, each property was only eligible to win one award.

The 113 winning properties hail from all over the globe and will be revealed in more depth on our blog over the next six weeks, starting this week with our European winners.

If you can’t wait that long to find out which hostels won awards, a full list of all the HostelBookers Awards for Excellence 2010 winners are available on our website.