Hostels
Hostels, City by City
Hostels are not spread evenly, and most travel sites hide that by showing you a list wherever you search. We surveyed every city on StubOrder and the result was lopsided: a handful have dozens, and the large majority have none at all. These pages exist only for the cities that genuinely have a scene: 116 of them, holding 3,231 hostels between them.
StubOrder hostels: of every city on StubOrder, 116 have enough hostels to be worth a page, holding 3,231 hostels between them. The rest have too few to list. Most cities have none at all, which is the survey's actual finding rather than a gap in our coverage.
116 cities with a hostel scene
3,231 hostels surveyed
5 hostels minimum for a page
Where the hostels are
Filled areas have at least one city with a hostel scene; each dot is a city with its own page. The emptiness is the point: most of the map has no hostels in it at all.
The most hostel-dense cities we found
Ranked by what share of the city's listed accommodation is hostels rather than hotels, which is a better measure of a hostel city than the raw count. A big city will have more hostels simply because it has more of everything; the share is what tells you whether backpackers are actually catered for.
| City | Hostels | Share of all stays | Hostel score vs hotels |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 58 | 9.7% | 7.2 vs 7.7 (-0.5) |
| Quito | 66 | 8.2% | 7.2 vs 8.3 (-1.1) |
| San Jose | 35 | 7.5% | 8.4 vs 8.3 (+0.1) |
| Mannheim | 22 | 7.0% | 8.9 vs 8.1 (+0.8) |
| Los Angeles | 42 | 5.7% | 6.8 vs 7.3 (-0.5) |
| Gliwice | 6 | 5.4% | 7.5 vs 8.7 (-1.2) |
| Stockholm | 28 | 5.3% | 7.3 vs 8.1 (-0.8) |
| Goteborg | 13 | 5.0% | 8.1 vs 7.9 (+0.2) |
| Hamburg | 32 | 4.4% | 7.1 vs 8.1 (-1.0) |
| Zapopan | 31 | 4.1% | 7.2 vs 8.0 (-0.8) |
| Wellington | 10 | 4.1% | 7.6 vs 8.5 (-0.9) |
| Barcelona | 151 | 3.9% | 7.6 vs 8.1 (-0.5) |
| Perth | 20 | 3.9% | 6.7 vs 8.0 (-1.3) |
| Baku | 77 | 3.8% | 6.3 vs 7.7 (-1.4) |
| San Francisco | 15 | 3.8% | 7.9 vs 7.9 (0.0) |
The last column is the one worth dwelling on. Hostels usually score below the hotels around them, and that is not a verdict on how they are run: a bed in a shared room is simply a harder thing to rate highly than a private one. So a city where the gap is small, or where hostels come out ahead, is telling you something real about the quality of the places there. Guest scores throughout are our accommodation partner's, not StubOrder ratings.
Every city with hostels
Most hostels first. Each page lists the properties, prices them for your dates, and links to the venues in that city so you can see what is walkable.
- Hostels in Madrid (156)
- Hostels in Barcelona (151)
- Hostels in Lisbon (130)
- Hostels in London (107)
- Hostels in Maracana (88)
- Hostels in São Paulo (83)
- Hostels in Kuala Lumpur (79)
- Hostels in Prague (78)
- Hostels in Baku (77)
- Hostels in Krakow (73)
- Hostels in Warsaw (72)
- Hostels in Porto (71)
- Hostels in Budapest (70)
- Hostels in Bogota (68)
- Hostels in Mexico City (68)
- Hostels in Quito (66)
- Hostels in Belgrade (65)
- Hostels in Santiago (58)
- Hostels in Singapore (58)
- Hostels in Vienna (58)
- Hostels in Berlin (54)
- Hostels in Rome (47)
- Hostels in Amsterdam (44)
- Hostels in Gdansk (44)
- Hostels in Milano (44)
- Hostels in Los Angeles (42)
- Hostels in Sevilla (41)
- Hostels in Malaga (40)
- Hostels in Tirana (40)
- Hostels in Paris (36)
- Hostels in Zagreb (36)
- Hostels in San Jose (35)
- Hostels in Athens (34)
- Hostels in Hamburg (32)
- Hostels in Miami (32)
- Hostels in Valencia (32)
- Hostels in Zapopan (31)
- Hostels in Auckland (29)
- Hostels in Dublin (29)
- Hostels in Edinburgh (29)
- Hostels in Stockholm (28)
- Hostels in Mannheim (22)
- Hostels in New York (21)
- Hostels in Bilbao (20)
- Hostels in Firenze (20)
- Hostels in München (20)
- Hostels in Perth (20)
- Hostels in Melbourne (19)
- Hostels in Riga (19)
- Hostels in Bratislava (17)
- Hostels in Brussels (17)
- Hostels in Montreal (16)
- Hostels in Santander (16)
- Hostels in Sydney (16)
- Hostels in Brisbane (15)
- Hostels in Donostia-San Sebastian (15)
- Hostels in San Francisco (15)
- Hostels in Copenhagen (14)
- Hostels in San Diego (14)
- Hostels in San Juan (14)
- Hostels in Goteborg (13)
- Hostels in Helsinki (13)
- Hostels in Lodz (13)
- Hostels in Nürnberg (13)
- Hostels in Christchurch (12)
- Hostels in Nice (12)
- Hostels in Bremen (11)
- Hostels in Kaunas (11)
- Hostels in Pamplona (11)
- Hostels in San Marco (11)
- Hostels in Venice (11)
- Hostels in Zurich (11)
- Hostels in Cluj-Napoca (10)
- Hostels in Hannover (10)
- Hostels in Köln (10)
- Hostels in Liverpool (10)
- Hostels in Vancouver (10)
- Hostels in Wellington (10)
- Hostels in Queretaro City (9)
- Hostels in Rotterdam (9)
- Hostels in Trieste (9)
- Hostels in Belfast (8)
- Hostels in Leipzig (8)
- Hostels in New Orleans (8)
- Hostels in Torino (8)
- Hostels in Washington (8)
- Hostels in Zaragoza (8)
- Hostels in Bristol (7)
- Hostels in Bronx (7)
- Hostels in Chicago (7)
- Hostels in Daytona Beach (7)
- Hostels in Hindmarsh (7)
- Hostels in Honolulu (7)
- Hostels in Manchester (7)
- Hostels in Vigo (7)
- Hostels in Bologna (6)
- Hostels in Frankfurt am Main (6)
- Hostels in Genova (6)
- Hostels in Gliwice (6)
- Hostels in Innsbruck (6)
- Hostels in Oslo (6)
- Hostels in Quebec (6)
- Hostels in Stuttgart (6)
- Hostels in Antwerp (5)
- Hostels in Bari (5)
- Hostels in Bath (5)
- Hostels in Düsseldorf (5)
- Hostels in Encino (5)
- Hostels in Fort Lauderdale (5)
- Hostels in Freiburg im Breisgau (5)
- Hostels in Hallandale (5)
- Hostels in Marseille (5)
- Hostels in Monterrey (5)
- Hostels in Newcastle Upon Tyne (5)
- Hostels in Sacramento (5)
- Hostels in Verona (5)
United States, by state
16 US cities with a hostel scene, across 7 states.
California
District Of Columbia
Florida
Hawaii
Illinois
Louisiana
Outside the United States, by country
Hostels are a European and Latin American habit far more than an American one, and the split below shows it plainly.
Albania
Azerbaijan
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Croatia
Czech Republic
Denmark
Ecuador
Finland
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Ireland
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Puerto Rico
Romania
Serbia
Singapore
Slovakia
Spain
Switzerland
United Kingdom
How this was measured
Worth stating plainly, because a number without a method behind it is just a claim.
| Step | What we did |
|---|---|
| Which cities | Every city on StubOrder whose coordinates we hold (181 surveyed so far), using the same coordinates the ticket pages use. |
| What counts as a hostel | Our accommodation partner's own property classes for hostels and backpacker accommodation. A budget hotel is not a hostel and is not counted as one. |
| Radius | About five miles from the city's centre point, the same radius used everywhere else on the site. |
| The denominator | Every property listed in that radius, not a sample of them. An earlier version of this survey capped that count and produced shares several times too high; the cap is gone and any city whose count is still uncertain is listed without a share rather than with a wrong one. |
| The cut-off | Five hostels. Below that there is no meaningful choice to write about, so no page is built. |
| Guest scores | Averaged from our accommodation partner's scores. Hostels are excluded from the hotel average so the two sides of the comparison do not overlap. |
Related
Frequently asked questions
Are hostels cheaper than hotels?
A dorm bed nearly always is, and the gap widens on nights when a city is busy, which for our purposes means event nights. A hostel private room is a closer call and often prices against a budget hotel, so it is worth comparing rather than assuming.
Can I book a hostel through StubOrder?
Yes. Hostels book the same way as hotels on the site, through our accommodation partner, with the confirmation coming from them. It is a separate booking from any tickets, and the two are never bundled.
Which cities have hostel pages on StubOrder?
Only cities where our accommodation partner lists at least five hostels. We surveyed every city on the site and most have none at all, so a page is only built where there is a genuine choice to write about.
Why are the percentages so low?
Because the denominator is every place to stay, and hotels vastly outnumber hostels almost everywhere. Even the most hostel-dense cities in this survey sit in the low single digits, which is exactly why the raw count on its own is misleading: 40 hostels in a city with 1,200 hotels is a different thing from 40 in a city with 200.
How is the hostel share calculated?
It is the number of hostels within about five miles of the city centre divided by every property listed in that same radius: hotels, apartments and hostels together. Both figures come from the same source on the same day, so the ratio is internally consistent even though the absolute counts change as properties come and go.
