Hostels: Affordable Alternatives or House of Horrors?

If you trust third-party booking sites, book a hostel.

By Layan Boulon

Graphic by Sisi Chen

My best friend Chloe and I had just landed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We’d spent days planning this big city trip from our small island home, Penang, where we were interning. The cafes were pinned, the landmarks mapped, the timing from the Batik Factory to the Batu Caves perfectly scheduled. Scanning Trip.com and GetYourGuide had replaced TikTok time. We compared ratings to reviews to Reddit posts to real-life advice from local friends.

We knew what we were doing. Chloe raved about the community you can find at hostels, and I had a down-for-anything travel approach, so any hostel we booked would be an experience worth the 30-odd dollars we saved by not choosing a hotel. With that,ur home away from home, we decided, would be “Mingle by Manor.”

If you always wanted to be a Disney princess, book a hostel.

“Mingle by Manor” seemed an entirely innocent name. I liked the alliteration, and Chloe liked the high ratings and good location. But when we arrived sweaty and tired, we didn’t expect the reception to tell us our confirmation for “one room, two beds” was actually “7 beds, all men's dormitory.”

Chloe and I laughed at the mix-up and calmly sent the front desk our confirmation emails. She told us about the issues she’d been having with room selection online. Two hours later, reception was still insisting she “really couldn’t move [us]” until even the older man watching the gambling channel for the past two hours got tired of hearing our pleading and went to bed. Only then did she decide “I guess I can move you to the 7-bunk all-female dormitory.” Patience, humor, and just the right amount of despair on your faces, and you can stay in the room you paid for!

If other people’s night terrors don’t bother you, book a hostel.

We climbed up rickety steps and heard a noise grow louder, and louder, and louder. Now, I came into this with zero hostel expectations… but Chloe? Chloe had been to hostels. In fact, she was the one who sold me on this. So when she turned to face me, wide-eyed, that’s when I got scared. Some genuine “Mingle by Manor” monster was going to jump out and claim us to the hell of the Trip.com booking-scape, or worse. But with each step, the sound became less demonic and more recognizeable, not a monster, just a woman. Screaming. In her sleep. In the room across from ours, in what could only be described as the most committed night terror any hostel wall had ever failed to contain. We stepped into the room and found princess stickers designating each bunk on the all-pink walls of our dorms. I was Anna. Chloe was Aurora.

Metal bunk beds with white sheets circled a room too small for 14 women. Chloe and I were across from each other, and not knowing the unspoken rules of a hostel dorm, we tried to keep quiet like everyone else. We jokingly argued over who would set the 5 a.m. alarm we needed for our 6 a.m. trip to Malacca, because yeah, our dormmates absolutely looked like they would try and kill whoever woke them up that early. Since I’m notorious for sleeping through alarms, Chloe honorably and bravely set hers on full ringer.

We didn’t need to worry after all though. Our 5 a.m. alarm never went off. By 3 a.m., the hysteric laughs-turned-cries of the older woman in the bunk next to me paled in comparison to the angry one-sided conversation the woman beside Chloe kept having.

If you can kill a cockroach in your sleep, book a hostel.

By 4:30 a.m. Chloe and I had been frantically texting for over an hour about booking it out of the pink dungeon. We tried to freshen up in the quaint, sticky bathroom, packed our things, and quietly slid out of the door. But there, on the ground, right outside our door, hope still in its eyes-- a cockroach. Not a small one either—it took up half the tile and stared us down, legs wriggling.We slipped out as the front desk lady scrawled on the whiteboard “Saturday: Bar Crawl, Saturday Night: Mingling”. Aw, cute. They do group activities.

Well…at least we got to be princesses for a night.