Learning to love hostels

I’m fairly new to solo travel, but I’m even newer to staying in hostels. A year ago I wouldn’t have set foot in one. After bad house-sharing experiences in the past, I’ve been living on my own for a few years and am well and truly used to my own space – the thought of having to share a room with strangers, in a bunk bed, was awful! However, as my desire to see the world and travel whenever I had the chance grew, I realised that I needed to give hostels a go if I was going to be able to afford to travel as frequently as I wanted to; hotel rooms can get horribly expensive when there’s no one to split the cost with.

When looking for accommodation in Lisbon earlier this year, I had a look at some private ensuite rooms in hostels there, and decided to book one for my friend and I rather than a hotel room, as it was so much cheaper. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and the first evening and morning were a bit of a shock; there were so many people around and it felt strange making my coffee and getting my cereal, and washing the dishes afterwards, in a shared kitchen like this – I felt like I was back in university halls! However, by the end of our first full day there, when we returned from a long day of sight-seeing to home-cooked Portuguese food for free, all-you-can-drink sangria for one euro, and conversation with travellers from all over the world, I felt totally at home there. I actually really missed the hostel when I returned home to my little flat and there was no one around in my kitchen! Our room was fantastic – much more spacious than any hotel rooms I’d stayed in recently – we were given city maps and advice on what to see and do and where to eat with the locals, and there was brilliant, reliable free WiFi. This was much better than being in a hotel and I was a total hostel convert – provided I could have a private room with my own bathroom.

Private rooms in hostels are cheap in comparison to hotel rooms, particularly when you’ve got someone to share the cost with; but when you’re travelling solo they can still be a bit pricey. So I decided that I needed to have a go at staying in a hostel dorm; if it was OK, then it would open up so many more options for travelling for me – I could even afford to go further afield than Europe, if I could keep the accommodation costs down in this way. So I booked my trip to Budapest, and booked into a hostel dorm, to see how I fared. It turns out I was absolutely fine! I wrote a bit about the hostel I stayed in in my previous blog post. I stayed in a six bed dorm but I only had one roommate the first two nights, and then I had the room to myself on the final night I was there, so I don’t feel that I had the total dorm experience that I was hoping to have! However I still had the experience of sharing a room and bathroom with strangers, so it did help me to decide how I felt about hostel dorms; irrespective of how many roommates I had, I still had get used to dorm etiquette etc. Dorm etiquette was the thing I was most anxious about – I’d read loads of blogs about it and so I knew that I should avoid doing anything with plastic bags when others are sleeping, I should be quiet, I shouldn’t put the main light on; but I was worried that I was getting things wrong – and also that I was disturbing my roommate by sneezing and coughing in the night! I’m hoping that getting the etiquette right and feeling more comfortable about myself as a roommate will be something I’ll pick up further the more I stay in dorms. As nice as it was to only have to share with one person, I think I would have felt less worried about disturbing people if there had been more people in the room.

So from my albeit limited experience of hostels, here’s what I love so far:

• The price! In Budapest I paid about £10.80 per night for a bed including breakfast – amazing. Staying in hostel dorms means that I can spend more money on getting to my destination – so I can travel further in the world. Travelling alone, I never really thought I’d manage to get to the US but now I think maybe I can afford it one year after all – hooray!
• Meeting people from all over the world. I don’t talk to other guests in hotels because I only see them in passing on the stairs, or maybe in the breakfast room. In hostels you meet people in the kitchen when making breakfast and in your room if you’re in a dorm, and in my experience everyone is open to saying hello and having a chat.
• Free WiFi that actually works. This was brilliant in both Lisbon and Budapest for checking things like timetables and ticket prices. It saves you having to think about all the info you might need and writing it down somewhere before you travel. I’ve stayed in hotels which claimed to offer free WiFi, but it was patchy and unreliable. The free WiFi is a big draw to hostels for me.
• Bonus stuff. In the hostel in Lisbon, the staff made yummy fruit pancakes for us every morning, there was free home-cooked food on offer most nights, and I’ve already mentioned the cheap sangria! They also arranged pub crawls in the Bairro Alto twice a week – we didn’t go on one as we were planning our own night out there, but if I’d been alone then this would have been a great way to experience the nightlife if I was nervous about going alone. You wouldn’t get any of that in a hotel!
• Good advice from the hostel staff on what to see and do in the city during your stay.
• The location. Again, limited experience, but both of the hostels I’ve stayed in have been in a great central location, and also in residential buildings on residential streets – so you’re living amongst the locals and even almost like a local, which I love!

And here are the things I’ve found difficult:

• Both hostels could get noisy – not necessarily because people were being noisy, but just from people moving around to go and use the bathrooms etc. In the Budapest hostel, the common areas were right next to the dorms, so you couldn’t help but hear people. I’ve stayed in hotels which could be noisy too, but I think they are less so because people are more likely to be just in their rooms. I tried earplugs but didn’t get on with them, so this is something I will just need to get used to.
• Worrying about disturbing my roommates. As I said above, I’m hoping I’ll get less worried about this the more I do it.
• Having to lock all my stuff away. In a hotel room you can leave your phone out on charge and leave stuff lying around while you go for a shower or to breakfast; in a hostel dorm, sharing with strangers, you take a risk if you do this. Also along the same lines, I tend to spread all of my clothes and belongings around my hotel room, but in a hostel dorm you don’t have the space to do this, so I had to learn to be tidy!
• Banging my head every time I sat up on my lower bunk. This is just me being clumsy however!

Would I stay in a hostel dorm again? Definitely. Will I stay in hostel dorm for all of my future trips? No, I don’t think so. Sometimes when I travel I am going on holiday, and I want to relax, which I don’t think I could fully do in a hostel dorm. So I will continue to stay in cheap hotels or private ensuite rooms in hostels sometimes; but I will be making use of hostel dorms for some of my trips. 

What about you – what do you think of hostels?

My bunk bed in Budapest