This is the way I choose to travel when I travel alone. My guidebook, aimed at middle class, middle aged Americans such as me, sings the praises of small pensions run by caring owners. While this sort of place would be nice for a couple, solo travel cancels out the benefit of sharing costs with a congenial traveling companion. Plus it's often lonely traveling by yourself.
So I choose the dorm approach, knowing perfectly well what a crap shoot it can be.
So far I've stayed a total of 3 nights in 2 IHA "Jugendherberge" places, in Frankfurt and in Hamburg.
Both places deserve their listing as good value $ (vs $$ and $$$) in my guidebook.
Bed linen is supplied, breakfast is decent, even the ensuite showers in the room are clean. Personally I prefer hostels with the bathroom and WC down the hall. They're usually cleaner and properly supplied with soap, paper towels and the like. The reception staff are professional, there are decent sized lockers in the dorm, and they try to enforce the "no smoking" rules. If you have to accept a top bunk, usually the rungs of the ladder are wide enough and you have a stool to step on when you reach the bottom one. I find top bunks rather problematic these days as I'm mobility impaired by the metal plate I have surgically implanted to keep my left ankle together. It's a very small handicap, and really manageable, especially when compared to some of the truly ghastly twisted or no-limb-at-all
immigrant beggars who i passed I passed in Munich, kneeling on the hard cobbles,and begging for change.
The disadvantage is, well, they're YOUTH hostels, which here in the country where they were invented, means they welcome large groups of young teens. Generally these mobs are properly chaperoned, but their ubiquity causes some odd workarounds at specific locations. In Hamburg, for example, if you need to use the handicapped elevator (as a solo loaded cyclist, duh) to get to reception, you have to buzz them to turn it on. And to leave by elevator, you have to buzz the front desk as there is no down button at all.
If the Jugendeherbergen are full, I choose either chain private hostels or independent hostels.
In Frankfurt I stayed at 5Elements, whose location in the red light district was a major contrast to the supermax security system used inside the hostel. Honestly by today, I just don't remember anything about the dorm room so it must have passed the "Cathy test" meaning considerate roomies, lockable locker and clean bathrooms.
My next 2 stops couldn't have been more different: the A&O hostels in Nurnberg (Hauptbahnhof) and Munich at Hackerbrucke. This places allow you to use your own sleeping kit. IMHO, this should be outlawed, and all hostels should be mandated to include bed linen in the room cost. In Munich I had stinkpots lying in the bed covers because they were either slobs, or, trying to save money (likely both). Actually I was glad I'd brought my camping gear, as at least I knew where it's been. For 2 nights I dealt with busloads of, first, Croatian, then French teenagers screaming into the wee hours, then lying slumped over their hot chocolate and cold cuts in the cafeteria next morning.
I decamped on day 3 to Euro Youth Hotel in Munich, where there were the community bathrooms I prefer, but still plenty of juvenile behaviour from my roomies, idiots who can't hold their liquor and will need to lie in their own vomit a few more times before they figure it out I guess.
In Cologne I had to settle for Meininger City Center, another chain with variable quality facilities. The elevator was wonky and undersized, and I'm carrying a fold up bike for heck's sake. This is a place I booked online from Munich as this was a last minute itinerary change due to flooding everywhere I was planning to go. There's a reason these places have space, when the ones in your guidebook don't. My last set of roomies were drunk and stuck up English idiots (that combination sure takes effort) and I think it was the mushroom cloud of nicotine that I had to walk through anytime I wanted to enter or exit this building that gave me the congestion I've had all 3 days since arriving in Hamburg. Gott im Himmel, there were smokers outside the door of this place at 6am! They must have needed to set their alarm clocks to wake up in time for a fag.
Still, not to say that guidebooks are always right though. oh no! I stayed in a recommended independent place in Fussen, on my soggy Neuschwanstein weekend. This place was downright wierd. The owner, the half-constructed mess of a yard, the argument I heard the owner having with I think some guy working construction for him, and my fellow roomies. If you stay in hostels as much as I do, you recognise the ones who accept "will work for food" types as long term guests. At this special place I shared my dorm with the 2 types of fellow travellers who make independent travel so memorable. The nice roomie was a fellow cyclist from near Weimar, a guy who'd likely grown up in East Germany, and exhibited such courtesy to me i had to doublecheck myself in the mirror to make sure i wasn't wearing a tiara. The other guy was a crackpot who told me he'd never been to Dachau as it was "too political" and said he disputed the number of people killed in the final solution. Now he wasn't just your normal run of the mill neo Nazi. I think he wanted to argue that, because firm records weren't kept at the concentration camps, there's no proof that 6 million actually perished. Gott im Himmel! So, what's a few million here and there, right? There were no people like Jews, gypsies , and in the insane closing weeks of the war, Russian POWs, who were so despised, they didn't deserve the attention of the camp accountants. Believe me, I don't deliberately seek out conversations on politically sensitive topics with perfect strangers. However, here in Fussen, close to Austria and the stamping ground of Adolph Hitler, I think there is definitely something in the water. This guy also told me that Adolph had a disabled half sister who was protected by big bro, that Hitler's parents were 1st cousins (Gott im Himmel) who'd already had a number of stillborns before they hit the jackpot, and that Hitler had a half brother, from an extramarital relationship with a British woman, who served in the American army and lived in obscurity on Long Island in New York.
Is it no wonder that Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, etc., get to write the "truth is stranger than fiction" books they do?
And all I did was greet someone over my brotchen und schinken at breakfast. As the cherry on top of my weekend in Fussen, I got notification from Google saying someone tried to hack my email from the AllGau region of Germany. And, ten guesses where Fussen is located?
On Monday I'm off for a week in Berlin, and, naturally, more incongruities as a solo bike traveler.
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