Hostels

Whether a hostel beats a hotel is a different question, and the hotels page takes it apart. This page assumes you already decided. What's left is choosing well, and most people choose on price and location, which are the two things that tell you the least.

Read the listing for the common room

A hostel is a building full of strangers, and what determines your week is whether those strangers are in the same room as you at 9pm. Somewhere with a kitchen, a common room and no bar is a place people cook and talk. Somewhere with a bar and no kitchen is a place people drink. Neither is wrong. Booking the second when you wanted the first is.

The reviews will tell you this if you read past the stars. Skip the scores and read the three-star reviews, which are the only ones written by people who were paying attention.

The dorm size question

Six beds is the number. A four-bed room is often a private room with extra people in it and priced accordingly. Anything past ten is a lottery on snoring, alarms and the person who packs at 5am with a plastic bag. The saving between a six and a sixteen is usually about four dollars, which is not what a night of sleep costs you.

On a long trip, price the private room too. In a lot of the world a hostel private lands within a few dollars of a cheap hotel and still puts you next to the common room, which is where you find out the bus everyone recommended doesn't run on Sundays.

Etiquette is just noise management

Almost every dorm rule reduces to one thing: nobody can see, and everybody can hear. Pack the night before if you're leaving early. Don't use the room light after midnight. Rustling a plastic bag at 6am wakes seven people, and a headlamp wakes none.

Book a few nights, not the whole trip

Beds are the part of a long trip you should book last and lightly. Plans move, a city you meant to pass through turns into a week, and the hostel you find by asking someone who slept there last night beats the one you booked in March.

The flights are the opposite - that's where a multi-stop route either works or quietly costs you a thousand dollars. AirTreks prices those. Beds you can sort as you go.