Alright, let’s not beat around the bush. Hostels can offer you an often significantly lower rate than hotels and even Air BnB’s, but that low rate comes at the expense of the more luxurious amenities and some creature comforts. However, its not all concrete walls and double bunks; done right, your next hostel stay could be a major vacation highlight. In my opinion the trade-off is not only more than worth it, it’s not even as big a trade-off as you might think. Here’s four major reasons why I truly believe it’s better to stay in hostels during a backpacking trip than hotels, even if you can afford them!
1. Hostel Staff Are Less Like Workers and More Like Friends
The person behind a hotel desk likely showed up early that morning and clocked in to stand there and be friendly and helpful to guests for a few hours before clocking out and going home. There’s nothing wrong with this of course, friendly and helpful are good qualities after all, but this person is not going to be sharing a beer with you when 5’oclock rolls around. One of the most unique elements of staying in a hostel is that in many cases the staff are actually living in the hostel. They aren’t counting down the minutes until they can go home, they are home. This means that you aren’t their guest, you’re their neighbor, and after a few days of interacting at the desk each morning, attending their city tours, cooking dinner together, and sharing that beer at 5’oclock, these people may easily become the quickest and most locally savvy friends you’ll make!
2. Hostels Can Offer Unique Communal Experiences
In addition to the unique experiences offered by meeting new people, hostels themselves can provide unique experiences for their guests. Many hostels are interestingly themed and have fun things to do within, like comfortable common areas with dining accommodations and a community kitchen, game rooms filled with ice-breaking entertainment, and lobby bars where you can meet new friends to travel with and explore the city. One of the best things about staying in a hostel is the sense of community among fellow travelers and many hostels highlight this by organizing events for their guests. Tons of hostels offer free tours of the city, sometimes several times a day, and bar crawls for the night owls looking to socialize over a few drinks on the town. Some locations host game nights in the common areas, providing excellent opportunities to meet new friends, or communal dinners where everyone can come together in the kitchen to contribute fresh local ingredients from the market that day, gathering to break bread and share stories. In the right hostel, you and those around you can quickly start to feel less like guests and more like family.
3. It’s the Easiest Way to Meet New People Abroad
Most hostels offer shared living spaces, including bedrooms and bathrooms. This could be taken as a negative thing, particularly for those who treasure their personal space, but I invite you to take this as an opportunity to get outside of your comfort zone. In fact, I think given the circumstances during a backpacking trip, this is preferable to having your own room. Think about it, you’re in a strange place you’ve never been to before, surrounded by people you’ve never met. What better way to get to know new people than living with them? Now don’t get me wrong, not every roommate will end up being your friend and not every shared living space will be comfortable. Some people are messy, some people snore loudly; you may even find yourself in a room full of people who aren’t your age or don’t share the same language. But that’s okay because it’s all part of the experience!
One of the greatest benefits of traveling is the opportunity to put yourself out there and do things you normally wouldn’t do. Exposing yourself in a hostel to all sorts of people from across the globe can absolutely be a part of this. Some of the most exciting experiences I’ve had came about from getting to know my hostel roommates. Many of them became friends to explore together whatever city we had found ourselves in; some were even willing to take the tandem exploration to other countries!
Because I was willing to get to know my roommate over late-night dinner instead of going to sleep, I was personally invited to attend a football match in Stockholm with the family of one of the players. Because I wasn’t afraid to approach a group of rowdy Scotts in my Berlin hostel, I had drinking partners for the remainder of my stay who I would later meet up with in Prague. The group of American kids who thought they were keeping me up one night were wrong; we ended up painting Barcelona red and running with the bulls together in Pamplona. The list goes on and many of these roommates are now friends who I still keep in contact with and can meet up with on future trips. If I chose to room alone, I would have missed out on many great experiences, and even better people.
4. They’re Cheap!
Of course, I’ve saved the most obvious reason to stay in hostels for last. The way I look at it is that any given trip is generally constrained to a certain number of resources. For easy numbers let’s say you set aside a cool $5,000 for a month’s vacation abroad and spend $1,000 on round trip airfare. Now you have a budget of roughly $1,000 per week to spend doing awesome things in a place you’ve never been! But wait, you don’t want to be sleeping on the street the whole time, do you? Of course you need a place to stay, and depending on where you are even modest hotel rooms can run $100 to $200 per night! That leaves you with a paltry $200 per week for eating, getting around, and actually doing fun and interesting things in the case of the $100 room, and if you picked the room for $200 you’re actually in the red by $400 per week! You couldn’t live like that at home, never mind on a sweet vacation. Conversely, the most expensive hostel room I’ve ever booked ran me just over $50, and that got me a private upstairs suite with a view. I wouldn’t normally have chosen this room, but it was all they had left. The least expensive hostel room I’ve booked was about $12 per night, and that was in a first world country! In our example, even the private suite leaves you with $650 to explore for the week, and the cheap room barely even eats into your budget, leaving a sweet $918 left in your pocket.
You get the point. With prices several orders of magnitude lower than hotel rooms, staying in a hostel allows you to allocate your precious resources towards the things you’re actually vacationing for. After all, even if you have the most extravagant lodging, you didn’t fly halfway around the world to stay in your room all day, did you?
In closing, just because I’ve compiled this list doesn’t mean I vehemently object to all hotel and resort stays. If there is a novel hotel or quaint bed and breakfast that you’ve been dying to check out, or if a relaxing stay at a luxury resort is part of your dream vacation, then you should do it! If it is a planned part of your trip that is personally valuable and has been budgeted for, then splurging to stay in one of these places is just as much a part of your travel experience as anything else. That said, I do believe forking over the extra money to stay at a downtown Marriott on a whim just because you’re uncomfortable with community showers is likely an unwise allocation of resources.
Wherever you decide to stay, I wish you safe and happy travels!
Wander&Wonder 
Exactly!
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Great post 😁
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