Hostelworld: Hostel Travel App

The St. Christopher in Paris France is a dumb. The rooms are not maintained. Contact paper was used to cover the steal table, and was worn and torn. Someone had pealed back some of the contact paper only to have exposed other layers of contact paper from before. The floor are not real wood floors but are vinyl flooring that looks like wood and that too is also worn in places. The private bathroom door handle was broken and just hanging there. The staffs response when I told them about the bathroom door was, “That’s a private bathroom what are you doing in there?” Not we will have maintenance fix that right away. By the way I have photos and I showed them to the staff and they could care less! Also be very careful what you book because the hostel doesn’t describe the rooms as dormitory rooms. You don’t find that out until you book your room. This was by far the worst experience that I have ever had staying someplace!!! The free drink that you get when you check in is for either a pop/soda Pepsi products, or a glass of juice. Also the free drink special at 20:00/8:00P.M is some sort of sweet drink that they make up in large batches, and if you are a nonalcoholic drinker like myself, you are out of luck because they will not offer you a free soda, an 0.0 alcoholic beverage. This establishment gets a 1 star from me.

A friend referred me to this app as he had used it in his travels. I too highly recommend this app. I have had an overall wonderful experience with the app. Not only was I able to find hostels in *most* all the areas I wanted, I was also able to find things to do in the surrounding areas, at great prices might I add too. The only downside to the app on my end is I keep running into latency issues and app crashes. I have tried restarting the app and changing VPN settings and even turning my VPN off, ensuring the app is up to date, etc etc. the app still tends to lag a bit at random when my connect is fine otherwise on every other app in my phone. Then every now and then the app will crash. I still highly recommend this app, however, looking forward to figuring out this latency and crashing issue at some point.

The app itself is good, and the general information you can see on each hostel is really useful, however… it’s really hard to know what you’ll actually pay for your stay, before you get there. Hostelworld typically doesn’t seem to include taxes and (usually more importantly) fees. So even though you may think you’ve already fully paid, you’ll often need to pay more once you try to check in. It’s never been more than like 30% extra or so of your initial price, but that’s still significant and I don’t understand why Hostelworld can’t include that in the price you pay through the app, or at least SHOW the full price you’ll actually pay when you’re comparing hostels. (Note that I’m not even talking about those classic scummy spots that charge you extra for sheets once you get there, even though, there too, I feel like Hostelworld should be able to indicate that in the itemized bill, or a notice as you check out that that will be the case). Point is, I wish Hostelworld would crackdown on the shady practices of SOME, though not all, hostels on the app.