When I first left to move abroad for university in 2007, a friend of mine let me in on a little secret for weekend getaways in Europe: Hostelworld.
Okay, so it isn’t so secret, and it isn’t so little, but I hadn’t yet heard of it and it quickly became one of my most important travel tools because hostels became essential to my travels. At the time, iPhones weren’t as prominent as they are now (and anyway, my friends and I all had those crappy little Nokia phones with about $20 US of credit per month on them), so there wasn’t necessarily an app for traveling and hostels and everything like there is today.
Eight years later, I still do rely on Hostelworld. There are usually four sources of information I turn to for finding a hostel: Lonely Planet, Hostelworld, travel blogs, and word of mouth suggestions. Lonely Planet and blogs give me a starting point in my search, and I go on Hostelworld to read the reviews on past experiences at a particular hostel or check the most recent prices for beds. I don’t book places in advance unless I am traveling at a major holiday.
Hostel life isn’t necessarily for everyone, but as I’ve talked about before, as a solo traveler, I’ve always liked hostels. Hostels are how I’ve made friends, and how I’ve taken some of the routes I’ve taken on my travels. But you want to be sure to pick a good hostel. You might be stoked to be paying a buck a night for a bed, but if that bed is teeming with bed bugs, then you’ll wish you splurged for the $5 hostel instead. Cheap isn’t always best.
So what makes a good hostel, and what makes for an overall fun and great hostel experience?
A Common Area
One of the best things about a hostel is the common area, and it is something I always look for when I am reading reviews on Hostelworld or reading about hostels on blogs. A common room makes the atmosphere so much more social and open. People just hang out, whether they are reading books, writing in their diaries, blogging, planning the next leg of their travels, watching movies, relaxing, getting ready for a night out, or lounging and recovering from a big night out. Hostels with a good common area are the easiest for making friends and meeting people, and for me they’ve always been among my favorite hostels.
A Bar
Sometimes, the common areas also have a bar, or the bar can be entirely separate. Either way, a bar helps makes things that much more social. Come night time, all you need to do is head to the bar in your hostel, and you’ll instantly find yourself with a group of 50 new friends. Hostels with bars may have happy hour specials or may throw theme parties or do something fun each night to keep things social and to keep people out and about.
Free Breakfast
Oh my god do I love a good, free breakfast at a hostel. The breakfasts can range from something small like coffee, toast, and jam — which isn’t ideal but is better than nothing of course — but other breakfasts at other hostels can be banana pancakes or omelettes. In New Zealand, hostels offered free breakfast or free dinner, and sometimes even both. (The hostel in Franz Josef was amazing for this!) Sometimes there will also be some fruits out that you can take back with you and keep for later that day or if you’re headed on a bus somewhere. Try to find somewhere that serves breakfast a little bit later, from about 8 A.M. or so (I am an early riser so the earlier the better for me) until about 10:30 or 11.
Free Wifi
So there are definitely some snotty travelers out there that are aghast that I’d say decent Wifi is something that makes a hostel great. It can definitely be annoying to see everyone plugged into their phones or their computers or their iPads, and I am seeing more of that with each year I travel. But at the same time, I do want somewhere with good internet, and it’s even better if it is free. You’ll find a lot of free wifi in Asia, but not Australia and New Zealand. I do so much blogging, and with trying to freelance, I need internet. End of story. And outside of writing-related purposes, I like talking to my family or my friends, so I want to be able to Facetime or Skype with them from my the comforts of my hostel.
Lockers
Lockers are really important. When I’ve stayed in guesthouses in Vietnam or India, for example, very rarely did they have lockers. But you just lock your bag up, lock your bags to some furniture, lock your room up, and hope for the best. At hostels, though, lockers really should be a given, and they should be free. I wouldn’t suggest staying in a hostel without lockers because you don’t really want to risk having your things stolen. You will want a place to keep your valuables – like your passport, your wallet, your electronics, and your camera, among other things – safe and secure.
Location
Here’s the thing: I want a hostel that is in the heart of where I am staying. I don’t necessarily like being far away from where everything is happening. Understandably, when you’re staying on a small island like Koh Rong in Cambodia or Pulau Weh in Indonesia, things are going to be much more chilled, relaxed, and low key. But for the most part, I need to be amongst it. I like being able to easily walk and grab food or water or shampoo when I need it. Location is also a key factor for me because when I am alone and traveling, I want to feel safe when I am walking at alone at night for example.
Showers
You want a good shower, not a bucket shower or a push-button shower. You’re not always going to find a strong, sturdy shower, and you’re not always going to find one with hot water (and in Southeast Asia, you don’t really need a hot shower anyway), but a decent shower is definitely going to make your stay that much better.
Granted my word is not Gospel, but in my experiences, these are just some of the things that have made for some of my favorite hostels. You’ll always want a place that is clean (well, your barometer for cleanliness definitely adjusts itself as your travels progress), a place that has a friendly staff and friendly guests who are in the same kind of mind as you are, and a place that feels like home. I’ve found hostels I loved cross New Zealand, hostels I loved across Indonesia and the rest of Asia, and hostels I’ve loved across Europe when I was just a kid starting out on her travels.]
Don’t let the horror stories about hostels fool you, because at the end of the day, whatever the hostel experience you have may be, a new adventure or story awaits.
