With the internet’s wonderful ability to distribute our opinions to all and sundry, no matter how ill informed or deluded we may be, maintaining a truly shit hostel has become an almost impossible task. Try hiring a sex pest to work behind the desk or cultivate a family of cockroaches in the bathroom and you’ll tend to find your establishment slipping down the rankings on hostelworld.com fairly quickly.
Back in the halcyon days, before even the Lonely Planet had written a guide book, the process of finding accommodation often involved a lot of aimless wandering around, making embarrassing attempts in languages you could barely comprehend, at asking random strangers if they knew of somewhere to stay. Sometimes we used things called maps, made of a substance known as paper, which lacked a satellite linked, coloured dot to tell you where you were. If you were lucky they had particular shapes on them which indicated the presence of hotels, so once you had ascertained where you were on the map, you could in theory narrow down the search area to only a few square kilometers. If you were somewhere civilised they even had things called tourist information offices that provided different bits of paper on which someone had printed information about places to stay.
Consequently, unless your hostel was so horrific that prospective clients fled within the first few minutes of walking through the door, you could probably retain a sustainable business – particularly if you relieved clients of hard cash at the earliest possible opportunity. Even with the advent of The Lonely Planet and its offspring, maintaining a right shithole was possible when there was enough demand to exceed the couple of options recommended in the guidebook.
There’s nothing quite like top notch toilet facilities to guarantee good reviews
Now, with the ruthless efficiency of free market economics and online customer reviews you have to travel further and further off the beaten track to experience truly prehistoric levels of quality. West Africa though has maintained a proud tradition of substandard accommodation, mainly because there’s nothing quite like a preponderance of poor, dark skinned people, for keeping the braying hoards of mass, white tourism at a comfortable distance. After three visits to the exceptionally, culturally rich destination of the Ivory Coast for example, I have yet to see another tourist which tends to indicate that you’re unlikely to find many results if you google, “Ivory Coast delightful boutique hostel”.
Think you’ve been to some shit hotels? Check out The Worst Hotel in Guinea
So, with most of the competition being at least fairly reasonable, how do you make your good hostel into a great one? Well, after many years of research across the continents I am happy to provide the answer to you all, free of charge:- a big table.
This seemingly simple answer may have many of you perplexed so let me give you an example of a hostel that gets it so right, where others have failed to grasp the importance of this one key ingredient. The wonderful Dan and Manty’s guesthouse in Las Terrenas Dominican Republic, whether by virtue of simply being a charmingly gregarious couple or the addition of a well thought out plan, have intimately understood that what separates the great from the merely good is getting the social aspect of a hostel right. Six months after your trip you don’t think a lot about the hostels that had nice pillows or gleaming tiles in the bathroom, you think about the ones where you made friends and shared experiences. That name on your Instagram feed, even if you’ve never exchanged a word with them since, will always be the person you met at a certain hostel, at least until the point you drunkenly tried to stick your tongue down their throat before throwing up on their shoulder and passing out in the middle of the dancefloor.
The legendary Dan and Manty’s
Dan and Manty’s facilitated this meeting with your future Instagram friend by virtue of the aforementioned big table. Every evening Manty and her family conjured up the most incredible spread of delicious food at a very reasonable price and all us travellers and the volunteer staff would sit around the table, happily gorging ourselves to the point of immobility. If you’d just arrived and were feeling shy and awkward there was no way you could be left out of the conversation. In this environment you’re soon planning trips to the beach, days out together or are staggering home, utterly inebriated at 5am with your best friend who you only met around that table just hours earlier.
Obviously it’s not practical for every hostel to provide such a big evening meal but breakfast can perform a similar function and Dan and Manty’s did that as well. It’s nudging people into close contact in this fashion that overcomes little cliques or loners staring at their smartphones wondering why no one is talking to them, failing to realise that everyone else is doing the same thing.
With Manty being a local and her extended family always helping out in the big, airy kitchen/dining area, the Spanish speaking guests had a direct route into the local culture, while her American husband Dan was always on hand in the evenings to do the same for the English speakers. The western volunteer staff very much played a part in the social life as well, which meant the only reason for being on your own was that you chose to.
Faced with this kind of spread every evening it was difficult to ever leave
Most hostels have friendly, helpful staff and many get the technical aspects spot on but you could dish out free pedicures and discrete hand jobs and still fail to create the convivial social environment vital to making a really memorable hostel. Some do manage to be memorable for other reasons, such as being served coffe in bed by a rather lovely transsexual at the La Casa del Viajero hostel in Mompox, Colombia. I did later reluctantly turn down the offer of a massage, not because I have any particular issue with a transsexual massage service but with my limited Spanish I wasn’t confident of being able to lay out the exact nature of the kind of boundaries that could be necessary in such an exchange.
When a hostel gets the social aspect right most people will tend to overlook technical failures, not that you could fault much at Dan and Mantys. Obviously there are limits: after flushing the toilet you generally don’t want to see the contents of the bowl again and its probably best to keep the wildlife to a minimum. However, if you’re the kind of person who marks down a hostel because the wifi speed wasn’t up to downloading your favourite porn action or there was a stained tile in the shower then I don’t think you should be allowed out in public anyway, least of all trusted with composing Tripadvisor reviews.
Even if you don’t meet the love of your life at a friendly hostel you can at least walk away with a new Facebook friend or fuzzy memories of an awkward sexual encounter on a wobbly bunk bed but either way your life will be a little bit richer for the experience.
