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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.

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.

United States hostel coverage map — or browse the list below

Worldwide hostel coverage map — or browse the list below

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.

CityHostelsShare of all staysHostel 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.

United States, by state

16 US cities with a hostel scene, across 7 states.

California

6 cities

District Of Columbia

1 city

Florida

4 cities

Hawaii

1 city

Illinois

1 city

Louisiana

1 city

New York

2 cities

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

1 city

Australia

5 cities

Austria

2 cities

Azerbaijan

1 city

Belgium

2 cities

Brazil

2 cities

Canada

3 cities

Chile

1 city

Colombia

1 city

Costa Rica

1 city

Croatia

1 city

Czech Republic

1 city

Denmark

1 city

Ecuador

1 city

Finland

1 city

France

3 cities

Germany

13 cities

Greece

1 city

Hungary

1 city

Ireland

1 city

Italy

10 cities

Latvia

1 city

Lithuania

1 city

Malaysia

1 city

Mexico

4 cities

Netherlands

2 cities

New Zealand

3 cities

Norway

1 city

Poland

5 cities

Portugal

2 cities

Puerto Rico

1 city

Romania

1 city

Serbia

1 city

Singapore

1 city

Slovakia

1 city

Spain

11 cities

Sweden

2 cities

Switzerland

1 city

United Kingdom

8 cities

How this was measured

Worth stating plainly, because a number without a method behind it is just a claim.

StepWhat we did
Which citiesEvery city on StubOrder whose coordinates we hold — 182 surveyed so far — using the same coordinates the ticket pages use.
What counts as a hostelOur accommodation partner's own property classes for hostels and backpacker accommodation. A budget hotel is not a hostel and is not counted as one.
RadiusAbout five miles from the city's centre point, the same radius used everywhere else on the site.
The denominatorEvery 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-offFive hostels. Below that there is no meaningful choice to write about, so no page is built.
Guest scoresAveraged 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 — 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.