Should you book hostels in advance?

Going on a Gap year or taking a long vacation? It can be confusing if you should book hostels in advance or wait until you arrive.

Being organised can make a big difference. However, you don’t want to be completely taken over by it.

Booking all your hostel stays at once will not allow room for flexibility and that’s what you want in order to experience the joys of travelling, freedom.

Travelling for the first time will make you want to book everything in advance as you’re heading into the unknown and want everything to be perfect.

That’s understandable as you don’t want to miss out on all the wonderful things travel can offer.

But this doubt can cause you a lot of problems in the future when you will demand more flexibility.

Flexibility is something you won’t have if you’re locked into all your hostel bookings.

But that’s exactly the point, booking all your hostels in advance will make you want to do everything and you’re going to wear yourself out and you’ll end up hating travelling.

What you want to do is spread it all out and go with the flow, that’s truly the best travel experience you can plan for.

Have a rough plan, but do as you want in between.

Leave your stressed out life at home and be happy to have the spare time to do whatever you want, make the most of it.

You’ll meet fun people that might be going a different route and you can easily change that if you don’t have any bookings.

One aspect you will have to book in advance will be flights.

The simple reason for this is because booking them on the day can cost you a fortune.

Advance booking will help you to cut the cost of your flights, but as for hostels the price will stay the same but the availability will change.

One great way of booking in advance but not effecting your flexibility is an Around The World Ticket (RTW).

Then you can book 5 or so stops and plan your trips around the 5 stops you have selected.

For example fly into Amsterdam Shiphol Airport to start your one month Eurail adventure and then aim to return to Amsterdam to use your RTW ticket to fly to Singapore for the South East Asia leg of your trip.

keep an eye out for peak season or key dates such as festivals that might be happening in the location you’re going to visit, you won’t want to arrive a day before without a place to stay.

I like to book my first hostel on arrival, it helps with filling out your visa information and after a long flight the last thing you want is a 4 hour trek around a city to find a place to stay.

The next day you wake up you can then do as you wish. By booking hostels in advance your limiting the freedom of the journey, you don’t want that whilst your on your trip, trust me, go with the flow attitude is the first thing backpackers start to pick up after a while on the road, enjoy it!

Thank you for reading my blog post and if you found it useful, be sure to leave a comment in the comment section below: