Hostel Estoril in Buenos Aires, Argentina
I love staying in hostels; but they are destroying the backpacking experience one hostel bar at a time. I’ve met great friends that I’ll likely keep in touch with for years to come. But I can’t help but think most of these hostels are kind of anti-the-point-of-traveling.
The only people from the country you’re visiting that you’re forced to interact with are usually the people running the front desk of a hostel. And he/she usually speaks fluent English so no problems there.
You Only Interact With The Cultures That Travel
To this point in my travels, approximately 90% of the people I’ve met in hostels have been from the UK. Then, throw in the Australians and Israelis and that brings us up to about 99%. (BTW the ‘USAns’ are few and far between).
Not everyone can travel. The countries that have citizens who can travel are distinctly different from the ones who can’t. So even though you meet and interact with different cultures, these cultures are much more similar to yours. For the UK folks it must feel like Spring Break ’09 with your high school.
Hostels Have Everything
The Argentine hostels have been nothing short of incredible. Most have full bars with beer, wine, and spirits. There’s usually a breakfast included with the room price. There are even some with restaurants. AND, every single hostel has a ‘famous’, or ‘infamous’, asado night – sometimes 2 nights a week.
Asado night in Mendoza, Argentina
You pretty much don’t have to leave the hostel if you don’t want. And there are a lot of people that spend the majority of their time posted up in front of the TV or cruising Facebook. Of course, I am guilty of this also.
The hostels will even book all your excursions for you. A minivan shows up outside the hostel, you hop in, and off you go to a tourist-trap like activity. Some of these are fun (the bikes & wine video below), while some of these are disappointing (zip-lining).
Short clip with bikes, wine, and friends. Video courtesy of Albert.
Then, the same van drops you back at your hostel, you eat dinner there, then hang out at the bar chatting with people from the UK. If you do decide to go out for drinks, you end up talking to your hostel mates for most of the night in a corner of the bar.
Where’s The Adventure?
I absolutely LOVE staying in hostels and meeting people. But the times when I venture away from the hostel, are my most cherished moments. You can have excitement and adventure staying in hostels. But it’s getting to the point where people telling stories about interacting with locals, even on the most basic level, are more rare (and thus more exciting). Stories about hooking up with girls in hostels are almost boring now…almost.
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Not to say hostels are bad or other travelers are bad, however:
Thank you, derek. This post means a ton, because when I traveled down there, I stayed the hell away from most “hostel people” although I was almost exclusively in hostels. I can’t believe so many of these people waste a potentially awesome experience in another country glued to a TV or staying inside and hanging out with people from other countries similar to their own. Why?
I applaud you for escaping this scene and taking notice of the moments that truly matter in your travels.
Hey Derek,
I run a small backpackers hostel in Budapest, Hungary. You make some really good points in this article – Hostelling became an industry in the past decade or two, therefore these comfort services showed up, which takes the challenge away. Yes and also no. It always depend on the individual. It’s always your own choice if you want to take the tour or just do it yourself. You can easily burn $100 a day even in South America or stick it to 20 bucks and still make a living of it. But if you can do it on a shoestring, you can make your trip five times longer, that’s the point. Backpacking is a challenge which gives you a chance to compete yourself on a survival training. See the most for the best deals which you have to investigate yourself. You will be always smarter than those who pay a fortune for a holiday and haven’t left their room at all!
On the hostels’ side, it’s not all about business, because then we could have rather opened a hotel instead. It’s a lifestyle as well which I enjoy. However, the competition evolves the market, I have to offer more and better than the others. This brings on enhanced services, tours and a requirement for a higher standard. I always envied off-beat hostels for the fact they don’t have to fight with competition. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll open one as a retirement plan!
We don’t have a bar but those hostels which do, have to make a living on it. We rather encourage people to go out and explore the city. Of course there are people who expect us to be a standard hotel for a bargain price and they are looking for a TV, bar restaurant… but I just laugh about it. Hostelling was never about the money, it’s about a lifestyle. There are a lot of investors around looking for some good ventures and hearing that the crunch doesn’t effect the budget market they try to invest in hostels… but regardless how many zillions they’ll spend on their business, if they don’t understand the philosophy, it will be a soulless bed-factory and regardless how many are them, such hostels like ours can always rely on backpackers like you!
Safe Travels!
Thanks for the comments Csaba. I agree with you 100%. If you don’t provide these services people aren’t going to go to your hostel.
I look at Hostel World all the time to judge if I want to go to a place and most of the ratings are based on whether or not these amenities are available.
But like Brian said, I really just wonder what motivates people to travel if they’re not going to get out and at least try to interact with a new culture. Maybe even learn the basics of a different language.
Hey,
I work for one of those evil large hostels with own bar, but I`m not going to apologize for offering comfort to our guests – sorry.
I honestly think you can still have a great travel experience without a freezing cold shower every morning or a rude receptionist.
I´m not destroying anything. We offer something and everybody is free to take it or leave it. You are right that backpacking is not what it was 20 years ago, but those “comfort zones” have attracted a lot of people to hostels who wouldn´t have stayed there before. Maybe they like the taste of it and become more adventurous next time?
Please look at it from this angle: I have travelled through South America a lot, the first time in 1993. The internet was not yet invented, there was exactly one (crappy) hostel in Buenos Aires and two or three more in the entire rest of Argentina. I had no choice but staying in cheap hotels, where I usually got a single room. Making a short phonecall to Mom once a week cost me always at least 20 Dollars. As much as I liked it to “interact with the locals” (oh yes I did!) I was always looking forward to arriving in a big city where I could have a chat with other backpackers.
It´s not the hostels´ fault. We like what we are doing, but we are doing it for a living, too. If we don´t offer what guests want, they´ll stay elsewhere and we can look for a new job pretty soon.
IMHO.
Klaus
Hey Derek,
Thank you for the reply. About motivation, it’s an interesting story. Backpackers are the first pioneers of traveling, because we can really go off beat. You quit your job and go, completely alone to discover the most all by yourself. Then you end up recommending a place or two to your fellow backpackers and someone, maybe you open up a hostel in the middle of nowhere. If you have plenty of guests, there might be someone else, a former guest or a friend of you opens up another one… and it keeps going on, until there are plenty hostels and bigger and bigger ones as well.
It is the same thing what happens with backpackers vs. holiday tourists. Your complaint is rather about holiday tourists than backpackers. They just went on a holiday, you went backpacking. It’s just black and white, that’s it. It’s not their fault they don’t dare/don’t have the time/don’t know about backpacking. It’s like being at the scouts, the juniors don’t know how to make fire. They can pretend it, but it won’t be the same.
The first pioneer hostels are always opened by backpackers. Then the more popular a destination becomes (and the more competition present), the more visitors gonna show up and the backpacker ratio is getting smaller. I don’t think it’s the hostels’ fault if those kind of guests gonna show up in the hostel but the hostel can focus on/specify for backpackers as well, to help people finding the right place and get what they want. The best thing I like in hostels is the diversity… There is no two identical place to stay.
Klaus, you are wrong.
It’s not about the bar, it’s about the people. As long as you have a lot of backpackers in your hostels, you still do a good job!
I wouldn’t call those places “evil” either. They just don’t know how/don’t care about focusing on main stream backpackers. There are some other different segments of the budget travel market which they can focus on, from the school groups to the holiday tours. It’s just about demands and offers but the best deal is when both sides profits in a business… so both guests and hostels would be satisfied on the deal!
Derek, you will always figure out how to find backpacker hostels and skip those hostels which doesn’t suit your requirements. Word of mouth is still a great resource!
Derek,
When I backpacked Europe for six months in 1973 it was right in the middle of the Watergate scandal. Americans were probably as disliked then as they were under Bush. You probably have your own set of stories on that.
Fellow travelers from Canada and other parts of Europe didn’t want to have anything to do with us because we were Americans. (The only friendly people on the road were Australians and New Zealanders -they didn’t care where you were from.) As a result, we spent a lot of time traveling with other Americans.
For the most part, the hostels then were ‘bare bones’ operations. A cot to sleep on and group showers. So, whenever we could find a cheap hotel, we stayed there instead of the hostels. When we did stay in hostels, we spent as little time as possible in them – basically just sleeping.
The best times were when we were able to connect with the locals. We had Eur-rail passes, and spent a lot of time on trains. That’s where we had the easiest time meeting local people. They tended to be more friendly if they could speak some English and more likely to converse because they were stuck on the train with us. And, naturally, we met a lot of locals in pubs and bars. Obviously, alcohol tends to loosen things up.
Other than in Sweden (for obvious reasons) there was really only one family that we got to know. They owned a butcher shop in Le Mans, France. We were there in February and happen to strike up a conversation about how much we liked their food. That lead to us staying at their house for a few days. They insisted that we come back for the 24 hour race in May (I think). We did go back, but we were worried that they wouldn’t even remember us. We were wrong. They had gift baskets waiting for us. They had remodeled their upstairs guest room to accommodate us and they bought us tickets to the race, including pit passes. That experience in itself was far more memorable than anything we did with the other Americans we met on the road.
Hi. On your page, I noticed that you list some travel websites, but you didn’t include Hostelz.com. Started in 2002, Hostelz.com is the most complete database of hostel information available anywhere online. The site lists all hostels for free and includes direct contact info for hostels and exclusive photos and reviews.
If you could, please take a look at the site, and if you think it would be useful for you it would be great if you could include it on your website. Thanks and let me know if you have any questions.
Sincerely, Jay
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