About Cheap Hotels

It's time to talk about my experience with hotels in Europe. I'm not a luxury traveller, so I always try to find the cheapest hotels to stay. 

In most cases, I just book a bed in a dorm room in a hostel. Dormitories are of course much cheaper than single rooms in general. Sometimes I can even book a comfortable dorm bed for less than 10 euros per night in a large city. The easiest way to find cheap dorms is through booking.com. I've tried some other websites that claim to have the cheapest rooms on the planet, only to see that the cheapest rooms they show are always more expensive than the cheapest ones on booking.com. Thus, if you browse booking.com, you'll stand a much better chance of finding the cheapest places to stay. However, you still need to do some more research before you place an order on booking.com if you really want the lowest price: sometimes the official websites of the hostels give you lower prices than what they post on booking.com, so I suggest you check its official website after you find a hostel you like on booking.com.

Apart from the price, I'd like to share with you some other tips about hostels. Usually, the mixed dormitory is cheaper than the single-sex dormitory, but girls need to take note - the mixed dorms are full of males, in my experience. Females tend to stay in female dorms, so mixed dorms usually have few females. If you're a girl and book a mixed dorm, it may turn out that you are the only female in the room. Isn't that a little bit uncomfortable? Well, if you don't care about that, it'll be fine. But if you hope there will be other females surrounding you in the room, you'd better book a bed in a female dorm room. Also important is that you bring your own toiletries to hostels. Some hostels provide you with towels, but some don't. Some of them have hand wash in the toilet, but some don't. None of them gives you a toothbrush or toothpaste. So don't forget to bring your own stuff. My last tip is that you'd better check the reviews on booking.com and tripadvisor.com before making a booking. For example, if a hostel has a review score below 5 on booking.com, you'd better avoid it like the plague. If you hope to get good hostel services, to read the reviews written by its guests will probably be the only way to figure out whether a hostel's services are good enough. And of course, it would be nice if you leave your own review on websites like that after your stay. Doesn't it feel good when you can help other travellers choose their hostels?

I was also meaning to write something about non-hostel hotels, but now I'm so tired. I'll show it in my next blog post.