Where To Sleep Tonight?

I recently bought a condo, finally. It was time. I had been renting for years and had resisted the chance to buy earlier because I was not ready. I needed to travel overseas for a year first. My move made me think about accommodations while traveling.

When I book a trip the second thing I look at after booking whatever flights or tours I am going on, is where am I going to stay? I usually stay in hostels as they offer the budget price that I am looking for. This poses a special problem for me because I am afraid of heights, so it is difficult to get out of some top bunk beds in hostels. I have to be particularly choosy, I discovered in Los Angeles in 2010, when the first morning of my year long trip overseas, I was trapped in my top bunk because I was too scared to get down, and it was a difficult bunk bed to get down from anyway. By the time I toured the South Island of New Zealand, four months later, I booked all my hostels based on three criteria: beds (not bunks), free meals, and free internet. No hostel offers all three, but sometimes two out of three ain't bad!

It depends on where you are visiting, what type of bed you will get. I soon discovered that I do not like the larger dorm hostels offered by Hostelling International, Base Backpackers, or Astor Hostels. That said, some of these hostels are okay. My favourite HI hostels that I have stayed in are YHA in Tauranga, New Zealand, and the YHA Santa Monica, in Santa Monica, California. Bath Bathpackers in Bath, UK was a good hostel too.

By the time I arrived in Auckland and stayed at a booked and paid for room at Base Backpackers Auckland on Queen Street, I decided I had had enough of Base Backpackers. They are a large chain of large hostels throughout the South Pacific and their clientele is the younger, rowdy, partying teenagers and early-twenty's set. Not my cup of tea. I decided to look for another option for the rest of my time in New Zealand. Arriving in Wellington, I found Rosemere Backpackers, a Budget Backpackers Hostel (BBH). It was great! It was an old house that had been turned into a hostel. It was one of the larger BBH hostels, but it worked for me. I stayed for 6 months! I found the BBH hostels to be smaller, with more character, offer beds sometimes, and they have free internet and a free meal once a week, usually. (Along with the standard free breakfast that comes with hostels anyway.) Rosemere Backpackers offered free soup on Wednesday nights during the Winter, and free barbequed sausages during the Summer.

I recommend getting a YHA membership card, as this offers accommodation choices worldwide, and quite often a 10% discount on activities in various cities too. Also, if you are traveling in New Zealand, a BBH membership is a good option too. Some websites to look at are:

http://www.hihostels.com/
http://www.hostels.com/
http://www.booking.com/
http://www.bbh.co.nz/

~Angie