Our vision is to be the world’s leading social travel platform.
We are on a mission to help travellers find their people and create unforgettable moments together. Connections matter as much as destinations, and we are building a global ecosystem to enable them.
Since the launch of our social network in the hostelling category in 2022, Hostelworld has experienced transformational growth. We have successfully welcomed over 2.6 million social members to our platform, proving the strong demand for connection in travel. This vibrant community is not just booking trips; they are actively engaging, co-creating, and becoming our most powerful brand advocates. The platform is rich with user-generated content, including a rapidly growing volume of customer testimonials and authentic travel stories that provide powerful social proof.
The growth in engagement is remarkable: the number of messages sent between travellers has grown significantly faster than the number of trips booked by social members, demonstrating the deep social utility of our platform. This momentum is reflected in our robust financial health, underscored by a strong balance sheet powered by an asset-light, cash-generative business model.
We are not just another Online Travel Agent (OTA); we have created a new category of travel altogether: Social Travel Our singular focus on helping travellers find people to hang out with is the foundation of our strategy. It has allowed us to build a powerful and defensible market position, which attracts highly valuable customers and shifts more of our business onto our mobile-native apps.
While our app and social features create a sticky user experience, our true competitive moat stems from the incredibly rich, proprietary data set generated by our social network. As our community grows, so does the value of this data, creating a compounding network effect that is nearly impossible to replicate. This "social flywheel" allows us to understand traveller behaviour, predict needs, and personalise experiences in ways that generalist OTAs cannot match. It is the engine that will power our long-term, differentiated growth and solidify our position as the sole player in the Social Travel category we created.
At our Capital Markets Day in April 2025, we unveiled our ambitious strategy to build on our success and realise our vision over the next three years. This strategy is organised around five key themes:
Strengthening the Core OTA Platform: We will continue to enhance our core booking engine, ensuring a seamless and efficient experience for our customers and hostel partners, further solidifying our position as the leading platform for hostel discovery and booking.
Building 'Pre-Booking' Social Features: We are developing innovative features like 'Travel Plans', designed to engage users much earlier in their travel journey. These features will accelerate the creation of social profiles and drive app downloads, fuelling our social flywheel before a single bed is booked.
Leveraging AI for an Enhanced Social Experience: We will embed AI into our pre- and post-booking features to deliver unparalleled personalisation and value. This includes AI-powered recommendations for people to meet, places to go, and things to do, making our social network an indispensable travel companion.
Expanding our Addressable Market: We will expand our reach and product portfolio through targeted partnerships and M&A. This will allow us to cater to a broader segment of the youth travel market and integrate new, complementary services into our social travel ecosystem.
Building New Revenue Streams: Our social network is more than an engagement tool; it is a new platform for monetisation. We will develop new revenue streams directly from our social features, creating value for our users and our business in ways that traditional OTAs cannot.
Our Culture
At Hostelworld, our culture is a direct reflection of our customers: adventurous, curious, and social. We have a shared love of travel that fuels our work and connects us on a deeper level. It’s a fast-paced environment that blends the agility and "scrappy" resourcefulness of a start-up with the experience and ambition of a global, publicly listed company.
We are a team of pragmatic optimists who are data-obsessed and results-driven. We value a ‘test and learn’ mindset, encouraging experimentation and empowering our teams to take calculated risks. We believe in doing the right thing—for our customers, our partners, and each other. We foster a supportive and collaborative atmosphere where diverse perspectives are celebrated, and where every team member has the opportunity to make a significant impact on our journey. We embrace the journey, not just the destination, and we seek leaders who will thrive in a dynamic environment and inspire their teams to do the same.
This role is based in Portugal. We have an office hub in Porto available for those who prefer a hybrid model where you can spend time with colleagues in-person. You will need to be able to commute to our office hub as required from time to time.
The Marketing Analytics team is the data engine behind paid marketing decisions at Hostelworld. We own marketing measurement & experimentation, run incrementality experiments, build elasticity and budget-optimisation models, and own the dbt models and Tableau dashboards that Performance Marketing relies on.
The team sits inside the broader Analytics & Insights function and partners with Performance Marketing, Brand, Product, CRM, and Finance.
The role
We are hiring a Marketing Data Analyst to join the team. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role combining four skill blocks:
Analysis — turning commercial questions into reproducible analyses that influence budget, bidding, and channel decisions.
Commercial & business focus — translating findings into narratives, opportunity sizings, and recommendations stakeholders can act on.
Analytics engineering (data modelling & dbt) — building and maintaining dimensional dbt models in Snowflake to power downstream reporting and analyses.
4.Tableau reporting — designing, optimising, and governing the dashboards used across Marketing and senior leadership audiences.
You will own a portfolio of recurring Tableau reports, dbt data models, analyses, and projects around marketing attribution, measurement, experimentation, optimisation & customer modelling.
1. Analysis
Run weekly and monthly performance deep-dives across acquisition channels (PPC, Paid Social, Paid App, Affiliates).
Build and maintain channel-level pacing reports, business reviews, and YoY trend analyses.
Investigate anomalies (cost spikes, conversion drops, attribution shifts) and deliver root-cause analysis.
Support measurement initiatives: incrementality tests, A/B tests, cohort and CLV analyses.
Produce clear, reproducible insight reports with charts, tables, and explicit recommendations.
2. Commercial & business focus
Size investment opportunities and contribute to budget-allocation business cases.
Support quarterly investment-opportunity memos and roadmap planning.
Maintain fluency in unit economics: CAC, CLV, payback, contribution margin as the enterprise north-star metrics.
Translate analyses into narratives for non-technical stakeholders.
Surface gaps proactively: flag missing topics, broken assumptions, and untapped opportunities.
3. Analytics engineering (data modelling & dbt)
Design and maintain dimensional dbt models in Snowflake.
Add and maintain dbt tests on critical models.
Refactor legacy SQL and migrate Tableau-embedded calculations upstream into governed dbt marts.
Follow Git workflows, peer review, and modular SQL practices.
Partner with Analytics Engineering on lineage clean-ups, incremental patterns, and ingestion of new marketing-platform sources.
4. Tableau reporting
Build and own Tableau dashboards used by Performance Marketing, Brand and Commercial teams.
Optimise workbook performance.
Migrate complex calculations from Tableau into upstream dbt models to keep workbooks thin.
Maintain a clean metric layer between dbt and Tableau so definitions are consistent.
Must-have
2–3 years of commercial analytics experience, ideally in marketing, e-commerce, or consumer-tech contexts.
Advanced SQL — window functions, CTEs, performance-aware queries on cloud warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift).
dbt — production experience building models, writing tests, and managing lineage and documentation.
Tableau — production experience designing and optimising dashboards used by real stakeholders.
Python for analytics — comfortable in Jupyter with pandas and a plotting library (plotly, matplotlib, or similar); able to write reproducible scripts.
Commercial fluency — comfortable with CAC, CLV, payback, contribution margin; able to translate a number into a recommendation.
Stakeholder communication — clear written narratives, structured insight reports, opinionated recommendations.
Software-engineering best practices — Git workflows, peer review, modular code, parameterised queries.
Nice-to-have
Exposure to marketing attribution (multi-touch, data-driven, MMM, incrementality testing).
Hands-on experience with paid-media platforms (Google Ads, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, GA4,AppsFlyer).
Experience with Streamlit or other analytical-app frameworks.
Familiarity with Airflow or another orchestration tool.
Awareness of mobile measurement (SKAdNetwork / SKAN, Firebase, AppsFlyer).
Exposure to causal inference methods (synthetic control, CausalImpact, difference-in-differences).
Competitive salary & benefits
Enhanced annual leave plus 3 Wellbeing Days per year
Paid family leave (maternity, paternity, surrogacy & adoption)
Agile working (plus a Working from Abroad Policy!)
Support for your ongoing growth & development
Inclusive people policies (sickness, menopause, compassionate and fertility leave)
A chance to give back to your local community with 5 paid volunteering days
Grow others - We fundamentally believe that investing in growing others benefits everyone, whether it's helping them develop hard or soft skills. We want learning and growing to be part of our DNA to help makes us a better team, together.
Master it - We are obsessed with our area of expertise and enjoy developing our skills. We rarely take things at face value; we investigate, interrogate, and always look for ‘the why,’ and wherever possible, we use data to find the best solution.
Collaborate - We are in it together, for the tough stuff and the celebrations too. To achieve the best results, we need expertise from all areas of the organisation, and we wholeheartedly welcome diverse thinking.
Adapt - We work fluidly, adapting to new information and the evolving environment while staying committed to our goals. Innovation and experimentation fuel our projects and we’re never afraid to pivot.
Deliver - Our focus is always on the end result; we value outcomes over activity. We collaborate to deliver work at speed without dropping any of our other behaviours.
We believe in talented and diverse teams that reflect the diversity of our customers and the communities in which we operate. Everyone brings different perspectives and experiences. We lay out the above requirements to guide applicants to the experiences that we believe will allow you to be successful in the role. If you don’t meet them all, please consider applying if you think you can still perform the role as described.
Hostelworld Group PLC a ground-breaking social network powered OTA focused on the hostelling category, with a clear Mission to help travellers find people to hang out with.
Our Mission statement is founded on the insight that the vast majority of travellers go hostelling as a means to meet other people; which we facilitate through a series of Social features on our platform that connect our travellers in hostels and cities based on their booking data.
To date the strategy has been extraordinarily successful: accelerating revenues beyond pre pandemic levels, generating significant word of mouth from our customers, and strong endorsements from our Hostel partners. As a consequence, we expect to serve almost 8M travellers on our platform with a GMV in the range of €500M in 2022; and continue to grow GMV to €700M+ by 2025. More details of our growth strategy and our significant growth ambitions are available in our recent Capital Markets Day presentation on our corporate website.
Founded in 1999, Hostelworld is a well-known trusted brand with 250 employees across 11 countries; hostel partners in 170 countries; and a strong commitment to building a better world in all that we do.
It’s hard to capture why it’s so great working at Hostelworld. But here’s a little snippet of some of the great policies we have in place to enable all our colleagues to work in a way that suits them to really get the best from everyone.
We offer Agile Working including flexible working hours, Quiet Wednesdays (aka, no meetings Wednesday), and the ability to work from anywhere you like in the country you’re employed in – café, hostel, rooftop bar anyone? We also have ‘Work From Abroad’ policy which allows our people to work from other countries for up to 30 days a year.
Check out our Careers page with our open vacancies here: https://global.hostelworld.com/careers
