Hungary Hotels and Hostels

If you’re going to Budapest, you can usually find a place to stay easily enough without planning ahead. The city is full of youth hostels and cheap hotels. Still, it’s always smart to book a place first just to be sure, especially in the summer. Anywhere else in Hungary, if you don’t plan ahead, you’ll have to do a lot of walking around and getting turned away before you find a place.

A bed at a hostel is usually about $12 a night. This includes breakfast at some places, but it’s a little extra at others. The breakfast is your standard continental breakfast—different kinds of rolls and cuts, coffee, tea, orange juice, maybe some hard-boiled eggs. A few hostels offer sliced peppers to put on the rolls. Occasionally they’ll put a couple boxes of cereal out in case one of the Americans wants some.

Hostels vary a lot—some have several stories of smaller rooms, Internet connections and nice bathrooms, some have 15 bunks in a room and no hot water. They don’t have curfews or sex-segregation or any of that bullshit. Some of them only allow smoking in designated areas, but in others the owners and guests are still living in the 50s, blissfully unaware that there’s a link between cigarettes and lung cancer.

You’ll run into people from all over Europe, and a lot of English-speakers (Americans, Australians, Canadians, English) at most of them. As for hotels, a cheap one won’t set you back more than $20 a night. Their clientele isn’t as diverse, young and rowdy, but they usually have nicer bathrooms and better breakfasts.

Most colleges rent out the dorm rooms during the summer and winter breaks. They cost about the same as youth hostels. The rooms are bigger and more private, but there’s no breakfast, and it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinthine halls of some of them. There are usually some foreign students who stay over the breaks, maybe some other broke young travelers, but these places usually aren’t crowded.

Camping is very popular in Hungary. The area around Lake Balaton is full of campsites, but they’re all over the country.

For other cheap options, like small pensions and people renting out rooms in their homes, try the Tourinform office of whatever city you’re in, or just walk around for awhile. Keep an eye open for “Zimmer Frei” or “szoba kiabo” signs. A double room is about $20 a night usually.

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