Hostel
What is Hostel?
A hostel is budget accommodation where you usually book a bed rather than a room. The bed sits in a shared dormitory with anywhere from four to twenty others, bathrooms are normally shared, and the price reflects that you are buying floor space and a locker rather than privacy.
The difference people are really asking about is a hostel against a hotel, and it comes down to what is being sold. A hotel sells you a private room; a hostel sells you a bed in a shared one, and rents the privacy back to you as an upgrade if you want it. That single change makes it cheaper, and it also makes it social in a way hotels are not — kitchens, common rooms and organised walks exist because the business model assumes you will be out of your bed and using them.
Most hostels now sell three things at once. A dorm bed is the cheapest and the noisiest, and prices drop as the room gets bigger. A female-only dorm costs the same or slightly more and is standard almost everywhere. A private room with an ensuite is the quiet option, and in an expensive city it can undercut a budget hotel while still giving you the kitchen and the common room — which is why the phrase hostel hotel gets searched at all. The building is the hostel; the room type is what you choose inside it.
What actually determines whether a stay is good has little to do with the price. Check the dorm size, since eighteen beds and six beds are different experiences at similar cost. Check whether lockers are big enough for a full pack and whether you need your own padlock. Check the bed itself — a curtain, a reading light and a plug socket at the bunk are the three things that separate a comfortable dorm from an endurance test. Then check the position of the bar relative to the dorms, because a hostel with a late licence downstairs is a different proposition on a Tuesday night than the photos suggest.
The costs that are not in the nightly rate: towels and bed linen are sometimes charged separately, a key or padlock deposit is common, and breakfast may be a few pounds rather than included. None of these is large, but together they close some of the gap against a cheap hotel, so compare the total rather than the headline.
Hostels also solve a problem that has nothing to do with money. Travelling alone, the common room is the easiest place in any city to end up with company for a day without arranging anything in advance — which is why they recur in advice for a solo traveller and why a shared dorm is the usual first answer to the single supplement that penalises people travelling on their own. If you are thinking about sharing deliberately rather than by default, room share covers what to settle first, and how to find a travel companion covers the rest.
Example of Hostel
Tomas booked a fourteen-bed dorm in Lisbon because it was the cheapest bed in the city and regretted it by the second night, when a group came in at four in the morning and turned the lights on. He moved to a six-bed room in the same building for a little more, got a curtain and a socket he could reach from the pillow, and slept. The hostel was not the problem and the price was not the problem; the room size was, and it was written on the booking page the whole time.