Hostelworld Hostel Listings Scraper

---

🎯 What this scrapes

Hostelworld is the web's biggest budget-travel hostel marketplace, and its own city search is the only way to browse it. This Actor pastes your city list into that search box for you — feed it 1-N city names like "Barcelona", "Bangkok", or "New-York" and get back structured rows for every listed hostel: overall rating and the full 7-category ratings breakdown, review count, distance to city center, shared and private room pricing, badges, geo coordinates, and a direct detail-page link. Built on curl-cffi with rotating browser impersonation and Apify Proxy so a run finishes clean city after city.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox TLS handshakes on every fetch, good hygiene on any target.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 and network errors — up to 5 attempts per city, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧩 Per-city fault isolation — an unresolvable city or an unparseable page skips just that city with a logged warning; it never sinks the whole run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable property IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. A city search that runs and matches nothing still succeeds — no data, no charge beyond the warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Hostel-price monitoring — track shared/private pricing for a shortlist of cities before booking.
• Travel content/blog research — pull structured hostel data (ratings, badges, pricing) for city guides and roundups.
• Market research — compare hostel density, average ratings, and price bands across cities.
• Booking-site aggregation — feed structured hostel rows into a comparison tool or app.
• Alerting — diff successive runs to flag new listings or price changes for a given city set.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
cities	array	yes	['Barcelona', 'Bangkok']	1-N free-text city names or slugs (e.g. Barcelona, Bangkok, New-York). Each city is a separate /hostels/{city} fetch;…
maxResultsPerCity	integer	no	20	Cap on rows returned per city, clamped to [1, 30] (Hostelworld's confirmed single-page SSR ceiling).
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': True, 'apifyProxyCountry': 'US'}	Apify Proxy spec. Country is pinned to US by default because Hostelworld's displayed currency is geo-sensitive.

Example input

{
  "cities": [
    "Barcelona",
    "Bangkok"
  ],
  "maxResultsPerCity": 5,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
id	integer	Hostelworld's internal numeric property ID.
name	string	Hostel / property display name.
type	string	Property type (e.g. HOSTEL).
url_friendly_name	string	URL-safe slug for the property name.
address	string	Street address.
city	string	City name as returned by Hostelworld.
url_friendly_city	string	URL-safe slug for the city.
country	string	Country name.
url_friendly_country	string	URL-safe slug for the country.
continent	string	Continent name.
url_friendly_continent	string	URL-safe slug for the continent.
avg_rating	['number', 'null']	Overall average guest rating (0-10 scale).
number_reviews	integer	Total number of guest reviews.
city_center_distance	['number', 'null']	Distance from city center in km.
has_availability	boolean	Whether the property currently shows availability.
is_new	boolean	Whether Hostelworld flags this as newly-listed.
image_url	['string', 'null']	Property image URL (medium, falling back to large then small).
rating_breakdown	['object', 'null']	Sub-scores: security, location, staff, atmosphere, cleanliness, value_for_money, facilities.
shared_min_price	['object', 'null']	Cheapest shared-dorm bed price (value + currency).
private_min_price	['object', 'null']	Cheapest private-room price (value + currency).
detail_url	string	Direct property detail-page URL, constructed without an extra fetch.
badges	array	Badge labels shown on the listing (e.g. Breakfast Included).
search_city	string	The input city query that produced this row.
search_total_properties_count	integer	Total properties Hostelworld reports for this city.
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row's city was fetched.

Example output

{
  "id": 722,
  "name": "Kabul Party Hostel Barcelona",
  "type": "HOSTEL",
  "url_friendly_name": "kabul-party-hostel-barcelona",
  "address": "Plaza Real 17",
  "city": "Barcelona",
  "url_friendly_city": "barcelona",
  "country": "Spain",
  "url_friendly_country": "spain",
  "continent": "Europe",
  "url_friendly_continent": "europe",
  "avg_rating": 9.48,
  "number_reviews": 11584,
  "city_center_distance": 0.92,
  "has_availability": true,
  "is_new": false,
  "image_url": "https://a.hwstatic.com/...",
  "rating_breakdown": {
    "security": 9.72,
    "location": 9.75,
    "staff": 9.69,
    "atmosphere": 9.4,
    "cleanliness": 9.31,
    "value_for_money": 9.22,
    "facilities": 9.33
  },
  "shared_min_price": {
    "value": 18.63,
    "currency": "EUR"
  },
  "private_min_price": {
    "value": 30.3,
    "currency": "EUR"
  },
  "detail_url": "https://www.hostelworld.com/hostels/p/722/kabul-party-hostel-barcelona/",
  "badges": [
    "Breakfast Included"
  ],
  "search_city": "Barcelona",
  "search_total_properties_count": 112,
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-15T12:00:00.000Z"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.2	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.005	Per unique dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $5.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

Only page 1 of each city's listings is server-rendered (up to 30 properties) — search_total_properties_count on every row tells you how many more exist. Individual property detail pages (full amenities, room types, photo galleries) and booking/availability-calendar data are not scraped in v1.

❓ FAQ

Is this legal?

We only fetch content the source makes publicly available. Respect any platform terms of service before using output commercially.

How do I export to Sheets?

After the run, click Storage → Dataset → Export and pick CSV. Google Sheets imports it directly.

Why is my run slow?

Some sources rate-limit aggressively. The Actor backs off automatically. Lower the maxResults setting if you're testing.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

---