If you have been watching any number of travel shows, you might be under the impression there are only two extremes when traveling abroad. The Youth Hostel and the Luxury Hotel. You might find that your dreams of seeing the world are limited by cost when you look at home much a hotel room goes for these days. Are hostels worth it? Even if you aren’t staying at a five-star place, a hostel certainly looks attractive when rates can hover down in the $40 per night range for some places. But are hostels worth it? When it comes to affordable travel in Ireland, this is what you need to know about hostels v. vacation rentals.
Late in Life Traveler: Comfort vs Cost
At the age of 47, I decided to try the cheap route to extend my trip to Ireland last summer by staying three nights out of nine at a hostel. They used to call them “Youth Hostels” but now the term is sorta exclusionary to the middle-aged who can’t afford ten days at a Four Seasons. So, the first thing I did was to hop onto the site for Hostelworld and it gave me a lot of options to choose from.
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Cost and Accommodations for Hostels in Ireland
The place I picked out in Dublin was called Abigail’s Hostel, which was right on the River Liffey and really close to Temple Bar, which is where I heard all the good craic is. I didn’t really care about what my room would look like. I just needed a bed and a place to stash my backpack. The price was about €50 per night, which was at least half as much as any hotel in Dublin. Vacation rentals weren’t much cheaper. I booked two nights. I wasn’t moving in, and I didn’t plan on being in the room if I could help it.
The room turned out to be a dorm which housed around 20 guests in bunk beds with cages on rollers under the beds to lock away your things. One en-suite bathroom and a separate room for a shower made for crack-timing when sharing with other guests. The mattress was a step above sleeping on the floor of an airport terminal and just below the cot that I used at Boy Scout Camp when I was 15. They did have USB outlets to charge devices on nearly every bed.
Age Isn’t Just a Number
I chose the hostel in Dublin too because I thought I might be able to make connections with other travelers. But at my age, the other guests regarded me as the face of mortality, and my mere presence was a stark reminder that one day they too would grow old, and bald, and probably die. After close consideration, I did notice that this crowd wasn’t avoiding me so much because of the vastness of my accumulated years, but because everyone was avoiding everyone else.
Truth be told, I struck up more conversations with other guests than most of them. It was like staying in a room full of serial killers–they stayed to themselves mostly. Really quiet.
Mattresses Matter!
Sleeping on that mattress was not something I was used to. As someone who hasn’t camped comfortably since my early twenties, I have to say I got better sleep on the plane flying over the Atlantic in the middle of the night. With the aftermath of being on Pandemic lockdown for two years, there was a part of me that really didn’t enjoy being sealed up in a room full of nearly two dozen strangers, all breathing the same fetid air. Listening to kids coughing their guts up throughout the night. Outside, I could hear the sound of fights and bottles breaking, traffic, police sirens, and nary any sign of good craic to be found.
The second night wasn’t much better, though the coughers had moved on, or possibly shuffled off their mortal coils. Or maybe they were sent to a sanatorium to attempt to recover from the consumption. I slept the second night because I hadn’t slept much in 48 hours. Sheer exhaustion, followed by the delirium of carrying everything I would use for the next week and a half on my back.
If you want to listen to my podcast about my time in Dublin, check out this link.
The Value of Vacation Rentals
I’ve done vacation rentals before. Sites like Vrbo make it easy. I stayed at a flat in London in a decent Knightsbridge property just off Brompton Rd. in 2019 for £50 per night. A cottage in Seaside, OR with a big chunk of my extended family for around $200 per night in March 2021 and a run down studio apartment in Park City, UT in September 2021 for around $100 a night. This property looked out over Galway Bay in Co. Clare.
What I Look for in a Vacation Rental
It was a small cabin with another unit attached–but I rarely saw them. It had its own shower, queen-sized bed, TV with Netflix, a mini-fridge, and a little corner of the room with an electric tea kettle and a chair for sitting and drinking tea and staring out at the sunset over the bay. After a couple nights in a hostel (hostile?) I fell into an uninterrupted sleep for at least nine hours. Possibly the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in.
Creature Comforts of Home
Like the hostel, there was no laundry on premises, so I had to drive to a filling station near Kinvara where they have a coin-op laundry unit. For €3.50 I was able to wash everything and dry it in under an hour. The property was quiet and an easy drive to just about anyplace I wanted to see along the Wild Atlantic Way.
No, there was no charming pub nearby I could just walk to, and due to the narrow Irish roads, it wasn’t recommended to ride a bicycle or even walk the roads for any distance without donning a hi-vis jacket you could probably see from space. At an average of about $100 per night, the vacation rental was worth it. It was clean, quiet, clean (worth mentioning twice), and still cheaper than a hotel (average of about $150 per night at the time).
Are Hostels Worth It?
I don’t regret my hostel experience. It demystified what Rick Steves and so many other travel personalities are always banging on about. My last night in Dublin on the way home was at Generator, a slightly more hip experience of hostel, with a full bar, gaming room, and a club atmosphere downstairs. The rooms were slightly less crowded and cleaner, but the mattresses were no more comfortable than Abigail’s Hostel.
Outside of the mattresses and the coughing and fighting for a spot in a dirty bathroom to shower and take care of your necessities, both hostels shared the common annoyance of some jackwaggon flipping on the lights at all hours. Apparently nobody under 30 has ever heard of the little flashlight everybody has on their smartphone.
Travel on the Cheap
For travel on the cheap, a hostel is an option. For long-time travel, I don’t know, maybe if you were backpacking across Europe and needed to save money and were used to sleeping on anything softer than a park bench, sure, go nuts. But for someone who is apparently of Royal blood such as myself, that extra $50 is worth it when you can have a mattress and linens free of some disease scientists thought had been eradicated (but surprise! It wasn’t!) and you don’t have to worry about somebody picking the locks or swiping your phone out of your pants pocket when you are in the shower. Let’s not forget about pesky dried peas people might plant under the mattresses.
I think the way to go would be if you were traveling in a larger group of people and you could all take over a large dorm room together. You would have your space, inexpensive accommodations, and if anybody flipped on the lights in the middle of the night you wouldn’t be out of pocket throwing a shoe at their head.
Hostels Have Their Place
I am really not a fan of hotels either, which is why I like vacation rentals better. You do need to be careful that your aren’t just renting somebody’s pull out couch in a busy house, like I’ve heard has happened to people before. Research is your friend. So are reviews. I think they are a fair compromise between comfort and cost. I don’t need chocolates on my pillow and turn down service, but I also don’t need to fight a bunch of teenagers to drop a deuce in the morning either. I’m not as resilient as I once was, and that extra little bit to pay for comfort and sanitation is worth every penny.
But, trying out a hostel is definitely an experience, even when you realize the “Youth” part used to be there for a reason. Are hostels worth it? I think they serve a purpose. For the over 30 crowd, I’m not sure what that would be. We often put up with a lot of bullshit in our youth, and by the time you hit my age, you probably won’t remember how awful the experience really was. It will be a good story to tell either way. You might be better off springing for a hotel or a vacation rental.
Flexibility to be on the Move
Hostels do give you flexibility to move from town to town. Lots of vacation rentals are cheaper with longer stays (since they wave or combine cleaning fees and other add-ons). You can cover more ground if your entire world fits on your back and you only need a place to sleep. You can even take on the challenge of new experiences through sites like Viator.
So, is it really worth it? For me, this time it was. Staying three nights in hostels bought me another two days in Ireland. At some point, the trade off can mean being reasonably comfortable for the whole trip, or perfectly miserable for longer stays. I can sleep in a comfy bed at home any night of the week. Sacrificing a few nights rest to experience Dublin was worth it, but I wouldn’t recommend exclusively staying in hostels if you can help it.
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If you still can’t decide between a vacation rental and a hostel, book a hotel if that’s more your thing. Hotellook lets you compare hotels in 205 countries with 250,000 properties to choose from.
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