Software with dorm-room dust on it

Travel404 is built by Laurens Borrey — a Belgian who went traveling, fell into the hostel world, and ended up running CO404, a group of three coliving hostels in southern Mexico: in Oaxaca de Juárez, San Cristóbal de las Casas and Puerto Escondido.

The software came later, out of frustration. Running three properties means living inside a PMS all day, and everything on the market fell into one of two camps: hotel systems with a "hostel mode" bolted on (great until you have an 8-bed mixed dorm and a group of six), or hostel tools that hadn't been seriously updated in a decade. Channel managers, booking engines, POS, staff scheduling, finance — all separate subscriptions, all half-connected, all slow.

So we built the system we wanted to work in. Not as a startup looking for a market — as a front desk looking for relief. Travel404 ran our own properties first; only when it was genuinely better than everything we'd paid for did it become a product.

What "built in the field" actually means

It's not a slogan; it's the development process. Every feature in Travel404 exists because one of our front desks needed it, and the first users of every release are our own staff and volunteers — people who will absolutely tell the founder when something is annoying, because he's standing in the same lobby.

• The tape chart is bed-level because our dorms are sold by the bed.
• Overbooking warnings appear on the calendar unprompted, because we've walked a guest to a competitor at midnight and never want to again.
• The channel manager watchdogs its own connections and heals after outages, because a silent sync failure once cost us real bookings.
• Volunteer permissions are granular because our teams turn over every few weeks, and a new volunteer should be safe in the system within one shift.
• Event pricing handles extreme seasonality because Día de Muertos in Oaxaca multiplies our rates by roughly ten every year — and the math has to be right per night, not on average.
• Every screen loads in under half a second, because software that lags gets postponed, and postponed data entry is how double bookings happen.

The part we care about most

Hostels don't sell beds; they sell the people in them. That belief shaped the one thing you won't find in any other PMS: a guest community app, where verified guests see who's staying, join the family dinner before they land, and stay connected after they leave. We didn't add it because a market survey asked for it — we added it because it's why our own properties exist.

The practical details

• The platform: PMS, channel manager (200+ OTAs via Channex), commission-free booking engine, payments & finance, operations & staff, and the community app — one login, one source of truth.
• Where it runs: in any browser, and as native apps on the App Store and Google Play.
• Languages: English and Spanish, everywhere — because our own teams work in both.
• Pricing: flat plans that scale with guest capacity, unlimited bookings, zero commission — it's all public.

Talk to the person who built it

Demos are done by people who run hostels, not a sales team reading from a script. Bring your hardest operational problem — the group booking from hell, the OTA rate mess, the volunteer chaos — and we'll show you how we'd handle it, or tell you honestly if we can't yet.