Onefam: Streamlining multi-country operations across 17 European properties

Twenty years ago, CEO Tony Subías identified an untapped opportunity in Barcelona’s hospitality market. Young international travelers weren’t just looking for a place to sleep—they wanted authentic experiences, meaningful connections, and a sense of community during their stays. This insight led to the creation of Onefam, one of Barcelona’s first urban hostels designed around the concept of travelling and shared experiences.

What started as a single property addressing this niche has evolved into a thriving hospitality group with seventeen properties across major European cities, including Madrid, Barcelona, London, Prague, and Amsterdam. With over 120 employees, Onefam remains laser-focused on guest experience, creating not just accommodation, but complete experiences through day and night activities that foster connections, friendships, and community among guests.

“What sets Onefam apart from other groups or hostels is the guest experience.” explains Managing Director Ariane Echevarría Delgado, “For us, it is essential that the guest has not only a bed or place to stay, but a complete package, which is why we organize activities day and night, so that connections, friendships are created.”

Vanessa Fontoura da Silva, Chief of Staff, explains this unique approach further: “I love to say that we are a company made by backpackers for backpackers. Most of the people that work at Onefam, first started traveling, and just fall in love with the hostel life.” This traveler-first mindset extends to their hiring philosophy, prioritizing candidates who are travelers themselves and understand firsthand what exceptional hospitality looks like from the guest perspective.

Onefam’s authentic, traveler-centric culture creates both their greatest strength and their biggest operational challenge. The same staff members who deliver exceptional guest experiences because they understand the traveler mindset also embody the wanderlust spirit—creating constant turnover as employees pursue their own travel adventures.

“Travelers don’t usually stick in the same place for too long, so we do have a huge turnover,” Vanessa acknowledges. “We’re constantly hiring and training new people. Sometimes four times in the month, I have new staff starting.”

This continuos cycle of recruitment and training was compounded by Onefam’s rapid expansion across multiple countries. Managing seventeen properties across different countries, including Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic and the U.K., meant navigating different regulatory requirements, billing compliance, and government integrations while maintaining consistent service standards. The complexity of daily operations, as Onefam Ramblas Manager Jona Ramos describes it, resembles “an orchestra with different pieces moving during the whole day.”

Before Cloudbeds, this constant training burden and multi-country complexity threatened to slow Onefam’s growth trajectory and strain operational efficiency.

Cloudbeds’ intuitive platform design directly addressed Onefam’s core challenge of rapid staff onboarding. The system’s user-friendly interface dramatically reduced training time, enabling new staff to become productive quickly despite the company’s high turnover rate.

“Learning Cloudbeds took me a whole day of practicing, not only the theoretical part, but being at the reception with the guests in front of me,” explains Jona.

This represents a fundamental shift from traditional PMS systems that typically require several weeks of training.

Ariane highlights how Cloudbeds serves as more than just a property management system:

Cloudbeds is that it's much more than a PMS. At the group level, we're managing hundreds of daily reservations, and Cloudbeds let us analyze all that data in a very short time, which really optimizes our decision-making process.

The platform’s extensive integration marketplace proved crucial for Onefam’s multi-country operations.

“The fact that Cloudbeds integrates with so many other tools makes it much easier, especially when we talk about different properties in different countries,” Ariane explains. “The regulatory compliance becomes much easier, and these integrations save us a lot of time in administrative management.”

These integrations handle country-specific requirements automatically, from Portuguese billing regulations to Spanish government reporting, allowing Onefam to maintain compliance across jurisdictions without additional training complexity for staff.

The results speak for themselves. Staff training time dropped from weeks to just three days on average.

“We usually take an average of three days to train our employees on Cloudbeds, and then they start to feel confident with the system,” Vanessa confirms. “As Chief of Staff, it’s very important for me that the system is easy and also offers several resources for the person to look for answers in case they need.”

This efficiency extends to daily operations, where Cloudbeds’ flexibility helps staff navigate the dynamic hostel environment.

By dramatically reducing training time and providing seamless multi-country operational support, Cloudbeds has enabled Onefam to scale from one property to seventeen while maintaining their unwavering focus on guest experience across all locations.