Hostelworld Rate & Availability Monitor — Hostel Comp-Set Pricing by Date (2026)

Build a forward-dated rate calendar for any hostel comp set: one row per property per arrival date per guest configuration, carrying the lowest rate, the dorm/private split, the pre-discount rate and the full promo stack, the property's organic ranking position, and Hostelworld's own per-date commission split. Turn on delta mode and a daily schedule returns only what moved — the price, the promo, the rank, or a property that vanished from a date it was previously priced on.

No login. No API key. No browser. Clean JSON / CSV / Excel, billed per row you actually receive.

How to build your comp set in 3 steps

1. Find your city id. Run mode City index with a countryId (England = 237) and you get every city with its Hostelworld id. Or skip it: London = 3, Munich = 20.
2. Set the window. cityIds + startDaysAhead + horizonDays. One city over 30 forward dates = 30 requests and a full month of priced comp set.
3. Click Run. Then add an Apify Schedule with deltaMode: true and you have a movement feed instead of a one-off snapshot.

Why this is not another listings scraper

Every other Hostelworld actor on the Store dumps a list of properties. This one is built around the three things a revenue manager or a travel analyst actually acts on — and they are all in the response, unused by everyone else:

Field group	What you get	Why it matters
Ranking	position, isPromoted, isFeatured, isElevate, hostelworldRecommends, veryPopular	Where you sit in the organic list for that date. Price without visibility explains nothing
Promo stack	promoTypes, promoNames, promoMaxDiscountPct, promoStackable, originalLowestAveragePricePerNight, discountPct	Pre-discount vs sold rate, and which promos are stacking (LOS, MOBILE, CUSTOM). This is how you read a competitor's discounting strategy
Commission	marginTotalPct, marginElevatePct, marginFlCommissionPct, marginContractualPct	The per-property per-date commission split the platform applies. It is not in Hostelworld's official partner API

Plus the ordinary essentials: lowest / dorm / private rates, currency, rating and review count, seven rating sub-scores, free-cancellation window and deadline, district, coordinates, distance from centre.

What a row looks like

{
    "propertyId": 14348,
    "propertyName": "Palmers Lodge - Swiss Cottage",
    "propertyType": "HOSTEL",
    "arrivalDate": "2026-08-15",
    "nights": 2,
    "guests": 2,
    "currency": "EUR",
    "cityId": 3,
    "cityName": "London",
    "countryName": "England",
    "districtName": "Camden",
    "lowestPricePerNight": 19.54,
    "lowestDormPricePerNight": 19.54,
    "lowestPrivatePricePerNight": 91.13,
    "lowestAveragePricePerNight": 29.68,
    "originalLowestAveragePricePerNight": 43.21,
    "discountPct": 31.31,
    "position": 2,
    "isPromoted": true,
    "promoCount": 3,
    "promoTypes": ["CUSTOM", "MOBILE", "LOS"],
    "promoMaxDiscountPct": 27,
    "promoStackable": true,
    "marginTotalPct": 21.0,
    "marginElevatePct": 4.0,
    "marginFlCommissionPct": 2.0,
    "marginContractualPct": 15.0,
    "overallRating": 88,
    "numberOfRatings": 17341,
    "ratingSecurity": 94,
    "ratingLocation": 88,
    "ratingStaff": 90,
    "ratingClean": 86,
    "ratingValue": 88,
    "freeCancellationAvailable": true,
    "freeCancellationUntil": "2026-08-13T23:59:59+01:00",
    "distanceFromCentre": 6.5,
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-25T18:40:00Z"
}

Delta mode — a cron that bills for movement, not for re-reading

With deltaMode: true, the first run records a baseline and every later run returns only cells that changed, each tagged with changeType:

changeType	Meaning	Extra fields
new	Property appeared in this city-date list	—
price_up / price_down	The cheapest bed moved	previousPrice, priceChange, priceChangePct
promo_change	The promo stack or its depth changed	previousPromoMaxDiscountPct
rank_change	Organic position moved by 2 slots or more	previousPosition, positionChange
disappeared	Priced on a previous run, absent now	previousPrice, previousPosition

About disappeared: this data carries no availability flag — a sold-out property simply stops appearing for that date. So absence is the signal, and it is only emitted for city-date-guest scopes that this run actually swept, which means narrowing your input can never fabricate a wave of false sold-outs.

Unchanged cells are not returned and not charged. A quiet day on a cronned comp set costs almost nothing beyond the run itself.

{
    "mode": "rate_calendar",
    "cityIds": ["3"],
    "startDaysAhead": 1,
    "horizonDays": 30,
    "guests": 2,
    "nights": 2,
    "currency": "EUR",
    "deltaMode": true,
    "deltaStateKey": "london-compset"
}

Who this is for

Buyer	Use
Hostel groups and revenue managers	Watch your comp set's forward calendar, catch a rival's promo the day it lands, see whether your rank moved when you cut price
Travel and OTA analysts	Dorm-bed pricing by city and season — a segment the hotel-rate feeds do not cover
Consumer and travel-sector funds	Budget-accommodation pricing as a demand proxy across cities and months
Channel managers and rate-parity teams	Pre-discount vs sold rate, promo stacking and commission tiers in one normalised schema
City tourism boards and researchers	Budget-bed capacity and price levels by district

Sizing your run (and your bill)

Rows = cities × dates, one request each, and a whole city arrives in a single request (London returns 83 properties at once, Munich 17).

Setup	Requests	Rows	At $0.007/row
1 city, 30 dates, one-off	30	~2,500	~$17.50
1 city, 30 dates, daily cron with delta	30/day	only what moved	typically 5-15% of the snapshot
5 cities, 60 dates, weekly	300	~15,000	~$105

dateStepDays: 7 is the cheap way to watch a long season: same weekday each week instead of every date. A single run is capped at 2,000 city-date combinations so a typo cannot launch a runaway sweep.

Pricing

Event	Price	What it is
rate-row	$0.007	One property priced for one arrival date and guest configuration, full field set
rate-change	$0.009	One cell that moved in delta mode, with its previous values
city-record	$0.001	One city with its id, from the lookup mode

Rows that fail to fetch are pushed as error records with the reason — and are never charged.

Limitations, stated plainly

• No availability flag exists. Sold-out is inferred from a property leaving the list for a date. That is honest and useful, but it is an inference.
• Rates cannot be backfilled. Nobody can retro-fetch a price for a date that has passed, this Actor included. A rate history exists only from the day your cron starts — which is exactly why starting the schedule early is worth more than any single run.
• Prices are the lowest available for the configuration you asked for, not a full room-type inventory. Sweep the stay lengths and guest counts your own guests book, since length-of-stay promotions only appear at the night counts they apply to.
• Only Hostelworld's inventory. The same hostel on another channel may show a different rate; this is the Hostelworld view, which is what Hostelworld ranking and commission apply to.

FAQ

Do I need a proxy? No. This data is served keyless to ordinary datacenter IPs — verified with 25 rapid consecutive requests and no throttling. The proxy input exists if you want it, but turning it on adds cost without improving results.

Do I need a Hostelworld account or partner key? No. The official partner API does exist, but it is gated behind manual affiliate approval and an HMAC-signed key — and it does not expose the commission split this Actor returns.

Why is my first delta run large? It is the baseline. From the second run on you only get movement.

Can I track private rooms only? Every row carries lowestPrivatePricePerNight alongside the dorm price, so filter on that field.

Other scrapers by Zhorex

• Booking.com Reviews Scraper — guest reviews with sentiment, delta mode for new-review monitoring
• Trustpilot Brand Watch — delta-mode review monitor across 8 locales

Legal

This Actor collects publicly available commercial listing data: property names, prices, promotions, rankings and ratings. It does not collect personal data about guests or reviewers. Respect Hostelworld's terms and applicable law in your jurisdiction, and use the data for analysis rather than redistribution.