Travelling is expensive, but it can also be socially challenging. For the typical “starving student” or “student stranger in a strange land” looking for a summer vacation with some new experiences along the way, lodging and transportation costs can be enough to make them scrap their travel plans and settle on some weekend excursions closer to home.
Luckily, many different travel-related businesses have recognized the need for cheaper and more social travel options: most prominently, the hostel.
Hostels are widespread in Europe and other parts of the world, but not so much in Canada and the US, where they have gained the mostly unfounded reputation of being transient hotels.
Large Canadian cities such as Vancouver have slowly taken the example set by most major European cities, where travellers can find 10Đ15 hostels filled with backpackers and travellers from all over the world.
Cambie Hostel manager Rebecca Joyce says hostelling is starting to catch on more and more with students, including lots of travellers from Victoria who come over to see friends or take in a concert in the big city. The Cambie Hostel has two locations in downtown Vancouver, and a handful of other hostelling options are located in the downtown core and closely surrounding areas.
Joyce, who moved here from Ireland last year and has stayed at countless hostels on her travels, says while hostels are a cheaper option than hotels for travellers, it’s the social aspect that many students end up enjoying the most.
“I think North Americans are coming around to the hostelling thing more. Some people that walk in don’t know what to expect, but they always end up liking it,” says Joyce. “Once they check in to the hostel and get to know the people in their room they usually end up having a great time, and they see it as having a completely different experience than what they expected.”
Hostels like the Cambie rent out dormitory rooms with a number of beds as well as private rooms for couples or travellers wanting more privacy. Dorm rooms are the most affordable, but the private hostel rooms are still much cheaper than the average hotel. Most hostels have shared bathrooms, common kitchen areas, and a pub downstairsŃin other words, the perfect place to meet other like-minded travellers.
“I always meet a lot of different people from around the world,” says frequent hostel traveller Chris Black, a native of Ontario who is currently working in BC, “and usually they’re here to do something, like go out and explore, or go out and have an adventure, and it’s easy to find people that are into doing things.”
Joyce says the Cambie encourages their patrons to mingle, and they have a policy of filling up dorm rooms before renting out new ones in an effort to create an environment where travellers can meet and share their experiences.
“The whole idea of hostelling is to meet other people,” she says. “If people are on their own, they’re usually looking for bigger dorms because then there’s a better chance of finding someone in the dorm that you’re going to be able to hang out with and do stuff with during the day. And they’re looking for a place that they can cook, so they don’t have to eat out at every meal.”
And then there’s the bar downstairs, a long-standing drinking hole for locals (the Cambie was built way back in 1897), but also a spot for travellers to unwind.
“The pub gets loads of locals, but all the backpackers will still go downstairs and they’ll drink together,” says Joyce. “It’s a very ‘everybody knows everybody’ atmosphere, even though some people may not know anybody when they first show up.”
Loud partying downstairs and trying to get to sleep in a roomful of other people isn’t for everyone. Jordan Sandwith, a Camosun business student and Interurban executive for the Camosun College Student Society, says with hostels you “get what you pay for.”
“There’s nothing quite like sleeping in a room with 15 people who all snore and not getting any sleep,” says Sandwith, who spent most of his travels in Australia and New Zealand staying at hostels. “I’d rather sleep in a car sometimes than sleep in a hostel.”
Sandwith also questions the cleanliness of hostels (bedbugs are a common concern, although most hostels take every precaution) and says he’ll still be staying at a hostel on his upcoming trip to Ottawa, but he’s going to push for fewer dorm-mates this time.
“I’m hoping that I find a hostel that has small rooms, because your experience is relative to the number of people staying in the rooms,” he says.
Meanwhile, Black says he hasn’t had any problems and would recommend dorm-room hostel stays every time. The more the merrier, he says.
“Absolutely. It’s a little cheaper and there’s that diversity of the people you meet,” he says. “If you go to a hotel you don’t really congregate in the lobby and meet people and go out together. At a hostel you can show up and not be part of a group, or on a schedule, and there’s always somebody there about to go do something, and you can just jump in.”
Joyce agrees that price does matter. But the experience matters more, she says. And if you’re looking to get to know the lay of the land in a new place, maybe settle into a new city for work or school, even better.
“It’s a really great way to meet people,” says Joyce.“We’ve had lots of people move into the hostel to start out and then they meet people and end up moving into apartments together.”
Need a ride?
Hostels can cut down on lodging costs and be a chance to meet new people, but what about getting from point A to point B? Buses, car rentals, and flights are źber-expensive and they can also be a very solitary expedition.
In 2006, two Montreal travellers launched a service called KangaRide, a more formalized version of what is traditionally called ridesharing.
While rideshares are available on most campus bulletin boards and websites like Craigslist, KangaRide provides some structure to make the modern equivalent of hitchhiking safer and more reliable.
And instead of staring at the back of someone’s head on the bus, or zoning out for several hours on an iPod, travellers get a chance to meet someone in the process.
“The best comments we have from people is when they tell us they couldn’t visit their families before because of the cost of bus tickets, and now some students can discover the country, when they couldn’t do that before,” says KangaRide CEO Marc-Olivier Vachon. “The most important thing to me is how it enables all of these beautiful friendships; it’s a way to meet amazing people.”
An online booking system with a $5 fee, a customer support hotline, and an online feedback and rating system similar to eBay helps keep drivers and riders in check, says Vachon.
KangaRide is similar to staying at a hostel, he says. Cue a partnership with Hostelling International, an organization of hostels worldwide.
“They refer a lot of new passengers to us, even from Europe,” says Vachon. “Ridesharing is the cheapest way to travel and it’s a very logical partnership for us.”