This trip around Western Europe is both the first time I have been interrailing and the first time I have been hostelling. On my last holiday of exploration in South Africa we travelled by car and stayed in hotels / B&Bs, travelling by train and staying in hostels is not a huge difference but certainly worth examining.
One of the first and most obvious differences with hostelling should literally jump out of this document – sleeping problems. In hostels you usually end up sleeping in a 4-8 person dormitory, obviously this greatly increases the chance that you’ll get woken up at some point. I would imagine that if you spend long enough staying in hostels you would eventually get used to interruptions and eventually be able to sleep through all kinds of noise, unfortunately a two-week holiday is not enough time to adjust. The second difference is about food, the breakfasts were often included in the price of the bed but are generally low-quality almost stale food, not something you can rely-on to satisfy your appetite.
The most important thing about hostels however is that they are cheap! We were paying about £10 per night for bed & breakfast which is a lot cheaper than you’ll get any hotel for – especially in the big cities we visited. Hostels are also very flexible, in most cases we just turned-up and got accommodation immediately, the only exception was Brussels where the first hostel we tried was full. In peak season it is probably a lot more difficult to find accommodation but most hostels will accept bookings over the internet or by phone so you can book your accommodation the day before you move on.
Having spent two weeks using the Interrail ticket I can say nothing bad about it, the flexibility and value for money you get is remarkable. We made a total of fifteen journeys with the following averages:
• £7.93 per journey.
• 3.1 pence per kilometre.
• 32km per pound spent.
• 254km per journey.
• 381km per day spent travelling.
In terms of transportation I would say that Interrail is by far the best way to travel around Europe, almost all of our trains were punctual – they were all clean, safe and relatively comfortable.
The only bad thing to say about the holiday overall is that it was utterly exhausting, sometimes we were leaving hostels at 05:30am to catch an early train. We also had to carry our 15-20kg bags around for stretches of an hour or more which does get extremely tiring. Other than that it was a brilliant whirlwind tour of Interrail Zone E and if I got the chance to do it all again I’m sure I would.