Ten real budget travel tips

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Do you continually feel wanderlust’s pull but fear that you don’t have enough money to see the world?

Your fears, thankfully, are misplaced. Despite the mainstream travel media’s concerted, ongoing effort to make you think that travel is solely the domain of the rich, it is actually possible to travel well for surprisingly little money–and not just in those places where good deals are plentiful.

If saving money is your first goal, always do advance research by perusing published articles and guidebooks covering your intended destinations. Also be sure to take a look around the budget-oriented travel media. The Guardian’s budget travel guide is very likely the best English-language newspaper for budget travel advice. The Guardian does an especially great job of focusing on budget travel itineraries and showing readers, step-by-step, how to travel well while remaining on a tight budget.

Following are ten general tips to help you travel for far less than you think you’ll need to spend. Later this week I’ll look at some local budget travel techniques that are little-known outside of their home territories, which will provide a useful supplement to this post.

1. Hostels and low-price hotel chains. Increasingly these days, hostels boast individual rooms, some with their own toilets and showers. So even if you’re no longer interested in early morning dance parties, don’t write off hostels. Many of these new hostels are also quite stylish, which means that in many locales ratty, filthy hostels are finally facing price point competition. Also of note are the newish budget hotel chains, like Tune Hotels (Indonesia, Malaysia, UK) and easyHotel (UK, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Germany, Cyprus, United Arab Emirates). With advance booking, these no-frills hotels can be huge money-savers.

2. Empty university dorm rooms. Many universities offer their rooms for very affordable rates during those stretches of time when there are no students around. Some of these rooms show up on booking sites and others can only be reserved through the universities themselves. During the summer of 2007, I stayed in a university dorm in Vienna for €19. My private room was clean and spacious, with appealing modernist touches.

3. Private home stays. Airbnb is the newest and slickest arrival on the scene, a well organized and very attractive listings site that allows proprietors and guests alike to comment on each other’s performance as hosts and guests. This social media function makes Airbnb especially useful for quality control. In many destinations, tourist boards organize private home stays; in some others, guest rooms are advertised by locals. Guidebooks should help you figure out the best way to go about securing reservations in private rooms. As always, use common sense.

4. Volunteer tourism, or Voluntourism. This tourism/volunteering hybrid has taken off in the past decade. To give but one example, Andaman Discoveries’ volunteer gigs in southern Thailand charge around $210 for a week of on-the-ground volunteering. That charge includes accommodation, many meals, and airport transfer. Check out VolunTourism.org for more information.

5. Couchsurfing. This free accommodation option is the ideal recession-era budget travel trick. It’s a free and very popular way to bed down. Though there are a number of couchsurfing sites, CouchSurfing is the granddaddy of the movement. Couchsurfing fans get starry-eyed when discussing the practice, which depends on peer review and typically prompts guests to contribute something (like meals or a service) to their temporary hosts.6. WWOOF. This strange acronym stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. This is a fantastic organization that pairs up farm hands with work opportunities on farms, providing room and board in exchange for labor. WWOOF currently lists farms in 100 countries and territories around the world. Many people get involved with WWOOF in a kind of quasi-apprenticeship manner, though the organization is open to travelers.

7. Social media. Travel bloggers are notoriously friendly and forthcoming with their tips and their time. Reach out to travel writers whose articles you’ve liked and strike up a friendly rapport. Approach them respectfully and you’ll usually find that travel writers love to share their knowledge. Scour Twitter for interesting people in the destinations on your itinerary. Be friendly and make contact. The likelihood that you’ll meet someone who will give you some tips for interesting local action is high. If you’re lucky, you’ll meet someone who will show you around, treat you to a meal, and drink a cheap bottle of something or other with you.

8. Supermarkets and street food. You don’t have to eat in restaurants while you’re on the road. Supermarkets, public food markets, and street food can all help you save money while traveling. In many places, you will find fresher produce in markets than in restaurants. Public food markets and street food provide a route into local culture and are usually quite inexpensive. Follow the crowds for the freshest and tastiest grub.

9. Hitchhiking. All the caveats apply. Be prepared, be careful, use your judgment, and embark on your hitchhiking adventure with a friend. Beyond the shared cost of fuel, hitchhiking is more or less free. It is a great way to meet locals and learn about the places you’re visiting.

10. Home exchange. Swapping your residence with another is far easier than it sounds. Home exchange networks charge an annual membership fee, which allows a place of residence to be listed. Once a listing is in place, members organize exchanges with each other. The net result? Free accommodation. And sometimes intercontinental friendships. Home exchange networks include HomeExchange.com, INTERVac, and International Home Exchange Network. See this article (written, to be fully forthcoming, by my first cousin!) for one family’s experience with home exchange.

[Image: Flickr / ArchiM]

Top ten hostels in Europe

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Staying in a hostel in Europe is a rite of passage for budget-conscious travelers making their way around the continent. This is particularly the case for budget-conscious younger travelers. Here are ten hostels across Europe that either receive particularly high user-review grades or are notorious enough in one or another way to be noteworthy.

St. Christopher’s at the Winston, Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Winston presents itself as “an interactive museum of modern art.” However it refers to itself, it is without question one of the most dynamic budget hotels in Europe, with a few hostel-style dormitory rooms on offer. It’s got a restaurant on the premises and a nearby nightclub, and is aesthetically far more exciting that your average hostel.

Långholmen, Stockholm, Sweden. Ever wanted to spend the night in a prison? OK, a former prison? Långholmen is a rehabbed prison located just a stone’s throw from Stockholm’s supercool Södermalm nabe. Fantastic, and not as austere as you might expect.

Good Bye Lenin, Krakow, Poland. Tucked away in a corner of Krakow’s history-rich Kazimierz neighborhood, Good Bye Lenin replays the aesthetics of Polish socialism in a cheery, friendly space. Very atmospheric and fun.

Balmers, Interlaken, Switzerland. In operation for over a century now, family-run Balmers is Switzerland’s oldest hostel. Balmers offers dormitory rooms, private rooms, and tent accommodations. And lots of fresh air, obviously.

Meininger, London, United Kingdom. The Meininger chain of hostels can be found mostly in big cities across Germany and Austria. The London outpost, though not particularly British in spirit, is a welcome, well-scrubbed addition to London’s dreary hostel scene.Oops! Hostel, Paris, France. Far more stylish than your average hostel, Oops! injects a blast of fun energy in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Hotel interiors wizard Philippe Maidenberg is responsible for Oops!’s fresh interior design.

Hostel Archi Rossi, Florence, Italy. One of the best loved hostels in Florence, Hostel Archi Rossi offers free wi-fi, free breakfast, and complimentary walking tours of Florence. Archi Rossi is very close to the Santa Maria Novella train station, too.

Kadir’s Tree Houses, Olympos, Turkey. Near Antalya on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, Kadir’s Tree Houses is a sprawling complex of bungalows, cabins, dormitory rooms, and campground. Kadir’s provides a great range of services (laundry and a travel agency, to name but two) and also includes both breakfast and dinner in its nightly rate.

The Pink Palace, Corfu, Greece. One of Europe’s most notorious party hostels, the Pink Palace is a garish temple of hedonism, just possibly the best place in the world to play spin the bottle in five languages. Woohoo!

Hotel 4 Youth, Berlin, Germany. There are two Hotels 4 Youth in Berlin. The branch on Schönhauser Allee gets especially high marks. 133 beds, conical pillows, and a few nice extras (seminar rooms, a pool room) make this a top Berlin hostel. Location in hip, bohemian Prenzlauer Berg is also a big plus.

(Image: foilman / Flickr)

Top ten traits of an excellent hostel

by Catherine Bodry on

I’ve spent nights in hostels that were probably just fronts for drug operations, and hostels that I wish I could live in. What makes a hostel good is fairly basic: cleanliness is the biggest issue, followed by orderliness and friendliness.

But a few traits separate the good from the excellent when it comes to hostels. Here’s what I’ve determined are the factors:

1. Good ventilation: It is so gross to open the door into a dorm and be hit with a wall of humid halitosis. It doesn’t matter how clean the room is; you just can’t cleanse the air of a dozen people sweating and breathing. A window (with a screen to keep the bugs out) and a fan work wonders.

2. Towels: Even threadbare ones are a nice break from the damp, mildewey clumps that backpackers are loathe to pull out of their packs and “dry off” with.

3. Separate male and female dorms: Boys are smelly. Girls can’t hang out in their underpants with boys around. And I appreciate being able to change in my room, rather than carry all my clothes down the hall to the bathroom, try to change without getting my feet or the bottoms of my pants wet, and then carry my jammies back (waking everyone else up in the process as I go in and out of the door).

4. Drinking rules: Don’t get me wrong – I like to party as much as the next 19- (or 33-) year-old. However, lax rules tend to lead to noisy late-night sessions, with giggly guests lounging around the common areas. At the least, drinking rules encourage folks to get out of the hostel and experience wherever they’re at. Even if it’s just the local pub.5. A big kitchen and a staff that cleans it daily: Unfortunately, you just can’t count on every guest to do their own dishes. And you definitely can’t count on them to wipe the counters and sweep the floors. A kitchen that gets a scrub down once or twice a day is a wonderful thing to behold.

6 Non-metal, non-creaky beds: Not everyone has the bladder capacity of a camel. Which means that not everyone is going to sleep through the night without creeping down the ladder to relieve themselves. And you’re gonna have folks who had a late night, or people who have an early flight to catch. It helps when the beds are a nice, quiet natural wood. And they don’t have plastic sheets on them, either.

7. Local knowledge and the ability to book tours: Three words: One-stop shopping.

8. Nightly activities: Canadiana Backpacker’s Inn in Toronto has at least one weekly activity a night, whether it’s karaoke Monday at a local bar, game night, or a Friday tour of a brewery. Some of the activities, like karaoke, are free, which encourages everyone to participate. It’s a great way to get out of the hostel and meet some other travelers.

9. A nightly/weekly limit: It’s been my experience that hostels without a stay limit attract folks who aren’t necessarily travelers, but rather are people in transition, trying to relocate to the city. That’s not exactly a bad thing, but it’s a different vibe than the regular traveler scene. And in one unnamed Alaska hostel, it meant a bunch of 50-year-old unemployed criminals men, selling cocaine and stealing cash from guests. True story.

10. A decent breakfast: It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but I’ll take a bagel and cream cheese over Wonderbread toast and jam any day. Decent coffee, brewed slightly strong, is a thousand times better than instant coffee. Put out a donation jar; I’ll gladly throw in a buck or two to feel full and awake for a couple of hours. HI Austin receives day-olds from a local bakery, which means that hostel guests can help themselves to almost-fresh doughnuts, french breads, and whatever else the baker made that day.

[Photo credit: Flickr user Barnacles Hostels]

Sydney hostel more than budget accomodation: Wake Up! backpackers reviewed

by Laurel Miller on

While I don’t expect anyone to ooze sympathy for the plight of travel writers, the fact is, when we’re not getting hooked up at swanky hotels, we’re often left to sleep on airport floors and bus seats. I actually enjoy those experiences; it’s the eponymous “youth” hostel I’ve grown weary of. I should add that despite their name, hostels (also known as backpackers) aren’t only used by young’un’s. Plenty of middle-aged, and elderly, yet spry, travelers use hostels, because they’re inexpensive and convenient. That said, us oldies need to choose carefully, because many hostels do cater specifically to hard-core partiers.

Hosteling was a blast in my 20’s and 30’s. But sometime around, oh, last year, I hit a wall. As in, sharing a dorm room with a mob of drunk, loutish American frat boys, or squirrelly girls garbed in non-ironic ’80’s attire was not only not fun- it was a form of torture. Such was my recent experience at one Base Backpackers in Sydney. I arrived late at night, with food poisoning, after a long flight. I’d intentionally booked a bed for three nights in a four-person, all-female dorm, with the hope it would reduce my odds of hostel hell. I was wrong.

After paying for three night’s accommodation, I staggered up to the sixth floor, wanting only to crawl into bed. Upon entering my assigned room, I found a gaggle of Scandinavian girls pounding beers, blasting music, and readying for a big night out. One of them gestured toward a dirty, unmade bed (mine), noting only, “It has not been cleaned yet.”

Let’s just say that I was assigned another room. The next morning, I booked a bed for the remainder of my stay at the incredibly kick-ass Wake Up! backpackers mere blocks away.

Confession: I meant to stay there all along, after spotting it on my way to the airport on my last visit. I forgot to write down the name, and for some reason confused it with The Other Place when I looked online, and pre-booked.

Wake Up! is what all hostels should strive to be. It’s not that it offers services and amenities others don’t: it’s that it does a better job, in a better facility, in an atmosphere that isn’t Girls Gone Wild meets Theta Chi. It’s youthful, but the welcoming vibe extends to all ages. The family-owned and -run business opened its doors in 2002, and has consistently racked up accolades ever since.

Located in a historic, seven-story sandstone in the “backpackers ghetto,” Wake Up! sits on the border of Haymarket/Chinatown (inarguably some of the best- and cheapest- eating in Sydney). It’s across the street from the Central Railway Station, five minutes walk to the CBD, and ten minutes to Darling Harbour, and The Rocks/Circular Quay, where the Opera House and Harbour Bridge are located. The bus stop for the beaches is just down the street.

Wake Up’s! staff is friendly and competent, the facilities are clean and modern, and the property offers just about every service a traveler could possibly need: 24-hour web and wireless ($3.50 AUD/hour), travel services, guided city and beach walking tours, a cafe, kitchen, laundry, TV/DVD lounge, storage lockers, airport transfers ($14 AUD), 24-hour
check-in, help line, and security; card access to floors and rooms, job search assistance, and mobile phones and cards for sale. There are also scheduled events like bar hops, beach barbecues, and theme parties.

Rooms range from twins and doubles ($98 AUD/room; $17 for third person), and double en suites ($108/room; $17per extra person) to four, six, eight, and ten-person dorms (some mixed, some female-only) ranging from $38 to $30 per person. Sydney has become heinously expensive, and you’re not likely to find accommodations as nice, and as centrally located, for these prices- a nearby Travelodge is currently listed at $147 USD/night. Note that prices will vary according to season. There’s a 28-day maximum stay, which is convenient for students and job-seekers.

My four-person dorm sported one bunk with a double bed on the bottom (the swinger’s room?), as well as a standard bunk, and a wardrobe. All of the rooms offer great views of Sydney’s southern CBD. Yeah, the decor is a bit tacky- walls painted garish mustard, puce, rose, or swimming pool-blue; white metal bunks, utilitarian carpet, bed linens that look like knock-off Ken Done motifs, but who cares? No one stays in hostels for the interior design, and what’s more important is that this place is CLEAN. The spotless communal bathrooms are massive, well-lit, tiled spaces with functioning shower heads and good water pressure (a rarity in hostelandia).

Should you find yourself in Sydney with a bit of a cramp in your wallet, or if you just want to save your cash for the city’s many other delights, check out Wake Up!
Just be sure to write down the name, first.

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Befriend the book swap – International travel tip

by Gadling Staff on

Instead of carrying enough books to last the length of your trip, seek out a hostel, bed-and-breakfast, or local cafe’s book swap. Sometimes they’re listed among a facility’s amenities in guidebooks. Other times, only asking — or (better yet) exploring — finds one!

Using book swaps keeps your luggage light, an imperative with new airline luggage weight restrictions. Also, perhaps, you’ll get turned on to a new genre of literature (as I did in Bolivia).

The Kindle holds no candle to discovering a love for short stories! Furthermore, a paperback is much less vulnerable to the elements… and to “sticky fingers!”