Thank you for your continued support this year. Here’s a snapshot of our biggest achievements in 2014:
- We celebrated 50-years in the hospitality industry with an event at the Hercules Pillars – charting our journey from one London pub in 1964 to 22 businesses, across 10 cities and seven countries in 2014.
- We won the Outstanding Achievement Award for selling over one-million bed nights in a 12-month period at the BETA British Youth Travel Awards. We also took home gold in the Best Customer Service category.
- Lonely Planet, the Rough Guides, Le Figaro and The Huffington Post named St Christopher’s Paris – Gare du Nord as one of Europe’s best quality hostels.
- We were listed as finalists in the Publican Awards 2015 categories for Best Employer, Best Accommodation and Best Operations Team.
- The sites in Amsterdam and Paris were awarded the title of Most Popular Hostel in the city, at the 2014 Hostelworld Hoscars. We also won the Best Hostel Chain accolade at the HostelBookers Awards for Excellence 2014.
- The Flying Pig hostels in Amsterdam celebrated 20-years in the business with the still-flying party, marking two decades of excellent backpacker accommodation in Amsterdam.
- With the launch of the new Belushi’s UK food and drinks menu, the first half bar sales grew by +16% and food sales increased by +17%. In the same period accommodation sales rose by +21.3%.
- We won the Best Marketing and Promotions accolade at the ALMR Dusk ’til Dawn Late Night Awards 2014.
- We launched the Dugout sports bar on Borough High Street, which the Evening Standard soon listed at one of the best pubs in London to watch the FA Cup Final.
- St Christopher’s Inns and Belushi’s Shepherd’s Bush were featured on the BBC’s One Show, highlighting the venue’s live music scene and international backpacker atmosphere.
- St Christopher’s Inns became one of the first independent hostels to successfully connect to TripAdvisor’s TripConnect web services – displaying a live inventory table on the TripAdvisor website. The tech team also won the 2014 Tnooz Thack Barcelona competition with a travel web app for managing Facebook events.
- The 2014 Bridge Walk for charity raised a record £96,574 in aid of Team Margot. The same cause became the Beds and Bars charity of choice in 2015.