Hostels, the real estate game & my revolutionary get rich quick scheme

My bunk bed in Barcelona, Spain

The contemporary world seems to be all about how you can make a quick buck out of the consumer. I understand this more when I am travelling than any other time. In Europe, you can gather a basket of goods and a portable chair, set up on the tourist strip and try to make cash. Tourists around the world are fooled by the ‘town square’ or the ‘main tourist strip’ with double the price being charged at restaurants and gift shops than you would pay a few blocks away from the action. Fake look-a-like cartoon characters and people dressed up in ‘traditional’ costumes wander around the same squares, letting you take a photo with them for a monetary donation. The airline industry gets it – charge for luggage, for extra leg room, for speedy boarding. Theme parks and airports jack up their prices because they have a monopoly market – if I need food or a drink, I have no choice but to starve or pay their ludicrous prices.

So with all of this in mind, I have a revolutionary idea which I almost cannot believe that hostels have not already implemented.

Charging for the ‘better beds’ in the ‘better rooms.’

I like to think of a hostel as being a real estate game. Real estate is all about location, yes? Proximity to the city, to public transport, to amenities. This is how hostels get good ratings on websites like Hostelworld for their location. Close to the train station or the city centre, or in a larger city where all the sites are spread out (such as London), close to major metro lines. Close to supermarkets and bars. In a quiet, safe street in a funky area gives you good real estate points; if you’re in a seedy, gross street with no shops nearby, bad real estate points.

The real estate game can go a step further in a hostel. When you book a bed in a hostel, you are booking a bed in a dorm of a particular size – so a bed in a 6 person mixed dorm, or an 8 bed female dorm, or a 12 bed dorm with an ensuite. Sometimes they charge more for a room with an ensuite – which is ridiculous because half the time, you wind up using general shared facilities in the corridor anyway – and a lot of the time, they do charge for female only dorms. Male only dorms are sometimes cheaper than mixed dorms – don’t get me started on the sexism here! In a large hostel, you might have 5, 10, 20 rooms that have 6 beds, and then another 5, 10, 20 with 12 beds.... and so on. The more people in a room, the cheaper they are.

In my life to date, I have stayed in more than 50 different hostels. These have been in Australia, all around Europe, in North America and even one in Singapore. I’ve stayed in smaller hostels that have more of a B&B or homestay type feeling, I’ve stayed in party hotels, I’ve stayed in HI Hostels sharing with a wide variety of demographics. I’ve seen it all, which I think gives me the unique expertise to be able to put together this revolutionary formula. Now, my revolutionary idea is that hostels could start playing the real estate game on a whole other level – and there are two subsets. Firstly, the room; and secondly, the bed within the room.

You can have two seemingly identical dorm rooms, but one can be better than the other. The major contributing factor is noise. Noise comes not only from your dorm mates, but from the street – if you’re facing the main street and the hostel is above or next to a night club, or there’s a construction zone across the road. If in the hostel, you are situated just off the common room, right outside the telephone or all the vending machines. There’s noise from bathrooms – old buildings often have squeaky plumbing, so sharing a wall with the bathroom. Also relevant is location within the hostel building - I’ve stayed at hostels where they ship you off to another building down the street or, as I had with Jazz Hostels in New York City, three blocks away. So then, if you want to see reception, use laundry facilities, go to breakfast – you have to hike back to the ‘main’ building. And yet, an 8 bed dorm in each of these buildings would both cost the same value. In a large hostel, what floor you are on in the building can impact your stay – if they have no elevator and you get sick of walking up and down three flights of stairs; or if the wi-fi only works in the parts of the building closest to reception, or if the bathrooms on your floor are being renovated so you need to go upstairs every time you want to use the bathroom.

So, with this, the hostel could offer a ‘reduced rate’ for a crappy room or, inflate the rate for the ‘better room’. So you have an 8 bed dorm with wi-fi in the room for 15 euro a night, or an 8 bed dorm where you can use wi-fi in the common room for 14 euro a night. ‘Quiet rooms’ cost an extra euro too.

You can break it down a step further – within each dorm room, you will often have ‘good beds’ and you have ‘bad beds.’ You will all be paying the same price – for a bed in a X person dorm. But just like sometimes you book a flight and you get the seat next to you empty or they offer to move you to the exit aisle with extra leg room and you get it lucky – sometimes, you are stuck in the middle seat next to a crying baby and someone with really bad body odour. You get ripped off. Hostels are like this too.

Let’s take your average 8 bed dormitory as an example. Mostly, there are bunk beds. Immediately, the bottom bunks are top market property. There are a series of variables depending on the layout of the room. Sometimes, all the lockers are together in one area – you don’t want to be right next to this, because then you get woken up when people go to and from their lockers. Beds right near the bathroom (if the room has an ensuite) or near the door into the room are also worth less. Other things can impact upon your stay – if there’s no room on the floor surrounding the bed for your pack or shoes, if you’re right underneath an air condtioner or, as I’ve had, literally within head being chopped off distance from a ceiling fan. It’s pretty easy, given all of these variables, for you to get stuck with a crappier situation than your dorm mate who, just two beds back into the room, is living in hostel luxury.

Prime real estate is a bottom bunk in a back corner of the room. You will have a power outlet right beside your bed, and, if there aren’t full pack size lockers, there is a comfortable spot either at the foot of the bed or at the wall right beside you, for your bag to be within easy access. The general room lighting will be good in your area – not blindingly bright, but good for what you need.

In some hostels, all the beds are bad beds. They have such ridiculous room layouts or try to cram so many beds into one room that it doesn’t matter where you are, it’s going to be similar. Similarly, there are some hostels who ‘get’ that these things matter. They understand their market – people who are travelling for extended periods of time and that for whom, the smallest of creature comforts can make a massive difference to morale and your memory of your time at that hostel. Your ideal room layout will have every bunk have a full sized locker – these are typically under the beds. There will be a small shelf on the wall, where you can put your mobile, room keys, water bottle – other essentials that you may find yourself wanting throughout the night. There will be an individual lamp, and your own power outlet – you can then have an electrical item charging overnight without worrying about it being stolen, such as if you plug it in across the room. At the really elite few hostels I’ve stayed at, you may have a privacy curtain, or simply the choice of bunks affords more privacy – by having three sides of the bunk made of solid timber, you are almost in your own cacoon.

However more often than not, you aren’t at a hostel which is at either end of the spectrum – most hostels fall somewhere in the middle. And if you’re travelling in peak season or even in popular countries in shoulder season, you’re rarely going to get any choice. Many hostels allocate the beds so you’re stuck with what you get; but if it’s just ‘take a free bed’ then generally, you may only have one or two choices.            

Now, you may roll your eyes at me for scrutinising this in such detail. However, when you’re backpacking for a long period of time, staying at hostel after hostel after hostel, it’s amazing how these sorts of elements can impact upon your morale. It is nice to walk into a hostel dorm room, find your bed, and see that you’re going to have a comfortable stay. It is frustrating when you have to fight to use the power outlets, when you have to tip toe around in the dark and forgoe writing in your journal because your dorm mate is asleep at 9pm and you’re just not that bitch who turns on the light anyway. This trip, I have been forced (either through the only available bed, or by bed allocation) to sleep in a top bunk at nearly every hostel I have stayed at so far in Europe. Compared to my last two trips abroad, I’m having a much worse run when it comes to bed allocations. I’m a little more accustomed to it now – in ’08 I hardly had a top bunk, in ’10 I had a few more, enough so that now in ’12 where I’m top bunk queen, they don’t literally make me want to cry and stomp my foot like I would’ve in ’08.

It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if some hostel implements my awesome idea – of course it is copyrighted and fifty percent of the profits from all of the charges for the great beds and rooms will come straight to me.

However as a budget traveller, I’d love to see more hostels taking notice of the leading hostels and trying to make their rooms as comfortable as possible. I accept that hostels cannot control drunk people or street noise or construction sites; but they do have control over their decisions about how many beds to cram into a room and the size of the lockers. Budget travelling is something that I think everyone should experience at some point, and in ‘real life’ I’ve met people who have stayed at a hostel at some point while interstate in Australia and had a ‘bad’ experience and this puts them off from the whole notion of backpacking or budget travelling, because they cannot imagine living in that shared environment for an extended period of time. I won’t lie, it isn’t for everyone, but the extreme of the bad hostels, bad rooms and bad beds don’t reflect the average and they definitely don’t reflect the ‘best.’

And then sometimes, none of this matters. A hostel or a city is so awesome that it doesn’t matter what the room is like because you’ll be out having fun anyway!