Staying in Hostels

Linnae, nobody can give you such complete reassurance. Hostels are not all d equal. A great, very good source of information are HostelWorld reviews (even more than TripAdvisor when it comes to hostels). There, you can read different reviews and get a glimpse of each place. You should also check carefully each hostel's website. Some tout and advertise themselves as sort of 'party centrals'. A very famous hostel in Barcelona, for instance, has a motto "if you want to sleep, go somewhere else". If the party scene is not your thing, you should clearly stay away from such places. Others are more tranquil, attracting a different crowd. However, since they involve sharing a dorm, you can never be 100% sure there will be not a group of rowdy, boozed up teenagers in your room.

Another good source for information on hostels, including unbiased reviews, is hostelz.com. My wife and I are seniors and we've stayed in hostels in the UK, Ireland, and France without encountering any revelers. Still, Andre is right. Even in a hostel that has a "quiet" reputation, if you stay in a dorm room, you can't guarantee that you won't have to share it with party animals. If a hostel offers single rooms, you could book one; but you'll pay more, of course.

There are never guarantees. Even a well-meaning, fully-sober roommate can cause you to wake up at 2AM and you could have trouble getting back to sleep. But then again, that same roommate could be the most interesting person you ever met. It's a gamble. But for reassurance, let me share that, as a family of 5 with 3 children, we have stayed in about two dozen hostels throughout Europe (granted, taking up the whole room ourselves so we didn't have to share with strangers) and have never knowingly encountered a drunk person. In fact, the people we have observed at these places have been among the most considerate travelers we have met. The only loud travelers we have encountered in hostels were a couple of school groups of 13-16 year olds. But even they were quiet enough by 10-11PM to not be a bother. When we do a search for hostels though, we do take care to visit their web sites. If bar scenes, parties and obvious alcohol consumption is prominently on display on the web site, we don't stay there. And we do read reviews and take note of what other people say about the place. So, a little common sense research, and you will be fine. (By the way, one of our favorite hostel experiences ever was at "Greg and Toms" in Krakow, a couple blocks southwest of the train station. Although it looked a little seedy from the outside, it was a wonderfully welcoming place and an amazing value - the only place we ever stayed that offered free meals in the communal kitchen and free use of the laundry!)

You can look at reviews on hostels. I go for the ones where "clean" and "quiet" are regularly mentioned in the review. I avoid the ones where "party" and "dude" are used commonly. There are a lot of the former. Even in the nicer hostels, it's important to bring a lock and make sure you don't leave anything laying around. Petty theft is a problem at virtually any hostel.

I stayed in the HI hostel in Nice, Les Camelias, and it was fine, nice location, fairly quiet. In general, no worries with hostels. I'm not much of a partier myself, but numerous times I met nice, interesting people in the room who were up for going out touring together, getting a meal, etc. Like Randy above, out of my dozens of hostel stays, I don't remember ever being put out by loud or drunk people. Plus the amount of money I saved vs. staying in even cheap hotels was enormous.