So at this point you have your cities all picked out… what is next? Figuring out where you will stay is a very good idea ahead of time. It is fairly easy to find a hostel or a room in larger cities, but if you’re in Verona, Italia at 4pm (in February) stuck outside in the cold for 5 hours asking strangers in italian how to get to a hostel on the outskirts of town, you are probably wasting a lot of valuable sight-seeing time. We ended up rushing around the next day, and we missed Romeo’s house!
Before you leave I suggest printing out google maps of your hostel locations. If you ever get lost then you can easily show the map to a local.
Hostels
The main two options for starving students are hostels and couch-surfing. Hostels are really NOTHING like what you may have seen in that scary film of the same name… they remind me a lot of camp; there are generally bunk beds, and good hostels will have lockers. In Ireland I stayed at a hostel where the water in the showers would only run for 10 seconds, and you would have to keeppressing the button in order to have a longer shower.
The price is generally 15 euros ($22 CAD) a night, but it can be higher or lower depending on the season. Pay close attention to whether you will get charged extra for sheets. I was pretty shocked at having to pay extra for this when I arrived at my Barcelona hostel, although it is actually a fairly common practice in Spain.
HostelBookers
This is my favourite hostel booking website; they impose no booking fees! You can search by city, and I find the best way to go from there is to filter the hostels by their ratings. The ratings are given by all of the users who visit them, and they are generally very reliable. I like also like reading the comments to see if there are any extra tidbits of info that could serve me well.
I like to pick the hostel by location; the best is when you walk right outside your hostel door and find yourself right amongst the best tourist attractions. This will save you a lot of money on public transit and taxi services!
HostelWorld
This site is similar to HostelBookers, but they impose a service charge. I also prefer the navigation of the HostelBookers website. They do have some hostels that may not be listed on HostelBookers, so if you are having trouble finding a hostel, then this is a good place to search.
Couchsurfing
I have never tried CouchSurfing but I have heard so many good things about it from friends, that I feel like it really deserves mentioning. The essence is that people open up their homes to travelers all over the world, and the hope is that you will also have your door open for them if they are ever in your neck of the woods.
The description from the official website:
“CouchSurfing members share hospitality with one another. These exchanges are a uniquely rich form of cultural interaction. Hosts have the opportunity to meet people from all over the world without leaving home. ‘Surfers,’ or travelers, are able to participate in the local life of the places they visit. We also give more people the chance to become travelers, because ‘surfing’ lowers the financial cost of exploration.”
I believe that proper CouchSurfing etiquette is to buy at least a bottle of wine and/or groceries for your host’s home. I have heard many nice things about how gracious these hosts can be to complete strangers; doing laundry, cooking for them, and even showing the travelers around town. There are different types of CouchSurfing hosts; some are really into acting as tour guides, while others are more strapped for time
Whatever you decide, just be sure to do research to ensure that CouchSurfing hosts have been vouched for, and that you are staying in a safe part of town.
Hotels
What you say? Hotels on the cheap? In groups, hotel rates can be reasonable! If you are going to a small town, too, there may not be many hostels around, and they could be all the way across town, so staying at a hotel might be the best way to go.
My friends and I stayed in a hostel in Avignon, and the price was right, but we ended up having to walk at least 30 minutes before we could get to the main part of town, and it was enormously difficult to find in the beginning. Because we were a group of three, we probably could have found a good rate at the hotel in the main downtown area (or in “the city” as my australian friends would say.)
pinkNINJA 