Australia's Mad Monkey Backpackers: 11 hostels, 1,600 beds, and one API to make their own rules

Across 11 hostels, 1,600 beds, and three Australian cities, Mad Monkey has built a backpacker hospitality business around moving quickly, trusting your people, and never being afraid to try something different.

It’s an approach that helped the independent hostel group grow from five properties to 11 in just two to three years following the pandemic, expanding its presence across Sydney, Melbourne, and Cairns while much of the industry was still finding its feet.

But for Mad Monkey, independence means more than choosing where to open the next hostel. It means having the freedom to challenge conventional thinking, experiment with new ideas, and build a business that operates on its own terms.

“The great thing about being an independent is that we can do what we want,” explains Dan McConnell, who oversees operations at Mad Monkey Australia. “We can do crazy things, like hire a data scientist fresh off his master’s degree.”

That decision would prove to be one of the group’s most transformative.

When owner Pete first told Dan he’d hired Blake Hodsman, a newly qualified data scientist with a background in technology, Dan wasn’t entirely convinced.

“I said, what the heck have you done that for? What are we going to use the data scientist for?”

Today, Blake’s models and insights are embedded in the way Mad Monkey operates, informing decisions across the business.

For Dan, the lesson was simple: sometimes the best investments are the ones you don’t immediately know what to do with.

And with Cloudbeds providing the operational foundation, Mad Monkey has given Blake something particularly valuable: the ability to turn the company’s most ambitious ideas into working technology.

Unlike many hostel markets, where travelers arrive for a couple of nights before moving on, Australia’s working holiday culture creates an entirely different accommodation dynamic.

At Mad Monkey, guests might stay for six days, six weeks, or six months. Some leave for a few days to explore another destination before returning to the same hostel. Others make Mad Monkey their home for considerably longer.

Dan recalls one guest who stayed for two and a half years during the pandemic.

That changes what successful hospitality looks like.

For someone staying three nights, a comfortable bed and a great atmosphere might be enough. For someone staying three months, the hostel becomes something much closer to a home.

“We focus on our people and our culture,” Dan explains.

The group hires for personality, kindness, and the ability to create a welcoming atmosphere. Staff often become the first point of support for young travelers experiencing life away from home for the first time.

The challenge is balancing that personal, community-driven experience with the operational demands of managing thousands of beds.

And unlike a traditional hotel, where rooms are generally sold as complete units, Mad Monkey operates primarily with shared accommodation. A single room can have guests checking in, checking out, extending their stays, and moving beds on the same day.

For Mad Monkey, the Cloudbeds API became an opportunity to create technology around how its hostels actually operate.

Blake’s original objective was to access the company’s operational data and use it in ways that were more useful to the business.

“We chose to use it so that we could get some better data out and do what we wanted with it,” he explains.

What began as an effort to simplify one operational process has since evolved into a custom-built ecosystem of dashboards, automations, and pricing intelligence.

Mad Monkey has built its own technology on top of Cloudbeds, using the platform and its unified data architecture as the foundation for increasingly sophisticated operations.

And because the group operates independently, it doesn’t need layers of approval to experiment.

“We can give Blake a brief and just say, look, this is what we’re looking to do, and then he can go away and iterate,” says Dan.

One of the first challenges Mad Monkey tackled was housekeeping.

In a traditional hotel, housekeeping teams generally work around rooms becoming vacant after checkout.

In a hostel, it’s a different story. A ten-bed dormitory might have three guests checking out, two arriving, and five continuing their stays. The room itself never becomes vacant, but specific beds need cleaning and preparing.

For Mad Monkey, this made conventional room-based housekeeping reports less useful.

The team had developed a manual process to work around the problem, but Dan saw an opportunity to simplify it.

“I said to Blake, hey man, surely we can automate this. And we did.”

Using housekeeping data accessed through the Cloudbeds API, Blake developed a custom housekeeping sheet designed specifically around the information Mad Monkey’s cleaners need.

With a single button press, managers can generate a report showing each room, the number of empty beds, and the number of checkouts.

No unnecessary information. No complicated room-status interpretation. Just the details housekeeping teams need to determine which beds require attention and what linen to bring.

“The original one was the housekeeping sheet for managers to be able to then pass that on to their staff or cleaners,” Blake explains.

For a group operating across Sydney, Melbourne, and Cairns, having access to individual property data is only part of the equation.

Mad Monkey also needs to understand how its hostels perform collectively.

How is Sydney performing as a market? How does Cairns compare with Melbourne? What does demand look like across the entire group, and how is that changing over time?

To answer those questions, Blake built a custom analytics dashboard using data from Cloudbeds.

“The next thing is a dashboard that we’ve got with our own data metrics that we want to look at in ways that we want to see it,” he explains.

The dashboard allows the team to examine performance across individual properties, selected groups of hostels, entire cities, or the full portfolio.

It also gives them the flexibility to explore historical performance and future booking trends using metrics tailored to Mad Monkey’s business.

Initially, Mad Monkey relied on the Cloudbeds API to retrieve the information needed for its custom analytics.

As the system evolved, Blake introduced Cloudbeds webhooks to capture reservation changes as they happen.

“The way we’re using the API is I’m just pulling out literally every booking and every change, whenever it happens,” he explains.

The webhook-driven approach means Mad Monkey’s dashboards can reflect changes to reservations without waiting for the next scheduled data extraction.

Whether a guest makes a new booking, changes an existing reservation, or updates a future stay, that information can flow into the group’s own reporting environment.

Blake also retained a nightly API-based reconciliation process to verify that the data in Mad Monkey’s system matches Cloudbeds.

The combination gives the team both timely visibility and an additional layer of data reliability.

For a business with long-stay guests, frequent extensions, and travelers moving between properties, that flexibility is particularly valuable.

Rather than simply reporting what happened yesterday, Mad Monkey can see how its booking position is evolving and use that information to support decisions across the group.

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of Mad Monkey’s API strategy is its custom automated pricing model.

The team wanted to use its own metrics and models to determine pricing for future nights, then apply those decisions without manually updating rates inside the PMS.

Blake built an automated pricing model to do exactly that.

“I’ve also set up an automated pricing model as well, so that it can price our nights going further out based on the metrics that we give it,” he explains.

The model allows Mad Monkey to define its own pricing logic around the information it considers important.

Crucially, the Cloudbeds API supports more than retrieving data. It also allows authorized applications to write information back into the platform.

For Mad Monkey, that distinction changes everything.

“Being able to write back is all pretty critical to us,” Blake says.

Without write-back capabilities, the team could still build sophisticated models and identify pricing opportunities. But someone would then need to manually implement those decisions in Cloudbeds.

Instead, the group’s pricing model can feed its outputs back into the platform.

Dan is equally clear about the importance of that capability.

“The write-back is pretty much the main driver behind us being able to write the pricing guide over.”

It’s the difference between having better information and being able to act on it automatically.

And for Mad Monkey, that’s where the real value of an open API lies: not simply accessing data, but turning it into operational decisions.

While Blake focuses on building custom technology, Cloudbeds also plays an important role in helping Mad Monkey manage the day-to-day guest experience.

Dan has introduced a more structured, KPI-driven approach to property management, with individual hostel managers measured against operational standards they can directly influence.

Rather than holding managers accountable for pricing decisions made centrally, the group focuses on areas such as guest reviews, cleanliness, maintenance, and service quality.

Cloudbeds Guest Experience helps support several of those workflows.

For example, managers use AI-assisted review responses to handle guest feedback more efficiently.

“They can just very quickly use the AI tools to build their responses, and they’re not bogged down trying to think, oh, how do I want to respond to this review?” Dan explains.

The team can then personalize the suggested response before publishing it, reducing administrative work without losing the human touch.

Mad Monkey also uses tickets within Cloudbeds Guest Experience to manage maintenance across its properties.

Tasks are assigned priority ratings, with five-star issues requiring urgent attention and resolution that day. Lower-priority items follow their own resolution timelines.

Dan meets regularly with the maintenance manager to review progress, helping ensure that outstanding work doesn’t disappear into an informal to-do list.

Cloudbeds reporting also supports the group’s financial oversight.

By comparing commission data from Cloudbeds against OTA invoices, Mad Monkey can identify discrepancies that might otherwise go unnoticed. Its accounts team has developed a spreadsheet-based process that automatically compares the downloaded reports.

For Mad Monkey, innovation is about having the freedom to do things differently, experiment with new ideas, and create solutions that fit the business rather than the other way around.

That independent spirit has shaped everything from the group’s post-pandemic expansion to its decision to prioritize better guest experiences over growth for growth’s sake.

“Every mistake that we make along the way is still worthwhile, because we’re learning what we do and what we don’t want,” Dan explains.

With Cloudbeds as its foundation, Mad Monkey has turned that philosophy into action. From custom housekeeping workflows and real-time dashboards to automated pricing, the team has built technology around the unique demands of running 11 hostels.

And they’re only getting started.

Looking ahead, Mad Monkey is exploring custom digital access, self-service check-in, integrated payments, and better visibility into guest spending. These ideas are still taking shape, but the ambition is clear: to create a guest experience that’s unmistakably Mad Monkey.

For Blake, that’s the real power of an open API.

“If it doesn’t have the feature that you want, you could then get the data and do it yourself, or push the data in the way that you would like.”

It’s a philosophy that turns technology from a constraint into a competitive advantage. Instead of waiting for someone else to develop the next solution, Mad Monkey has the tools to explore building it themselves.

And if the next big idea sounds a little mad?

Well, that’s never stopped Mad Monkey before.