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5 Tips to Poorly Run Your Latin American Hostel

These five tips are all too commonly applied in Latin American budget hostels. Follow all of them and you’ll still probably get plenty of guests if your prices are cheap enough and you're in the right location.

1) Don’t give your guests a tour.

Sure, many hostels aren’t that big and you can find everything without much trouble. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve found a TV room or an extra kitchen or bathroom I didn’t know existed after living in a hostel for a week. At the very least, tell your guests what extra services you offer.

And if you don’t give me a tour, then you can’t get mad at me when I use the unmarked ladies bathroom instead of the unmarked men’s (not that that’s happened…twice).

2) Don’t provide purified water.

It’s early morning. Your head is pounding from last night’s bender as you wake up ready to drink an ocean of agua, your mouth bone dry. You walk to the kitchen hoping there’s a self-service fridge of water bottles for sale or maybe even a water cooler. No dice. It’s too early for stores to be open, but even if they were, you’re in no condition to stray more than 50 feet from the comfort of your bed. You glance at that the tap and think, “How many parasites can the Guatemalan tap water really have?” It looks so clear, so refreshing.

Five months later and twenty pounds lighter your doctor is pulling 12 feet of tapeworm out of your stomach. On the plus side it worked better than a diet.

3) Offer 24 hour access, but be sure to hire a night watchman who can sleep through the detonation of an atomic bomb.

“Come on dude. It’s 4:30 in the morning, I had to walk an hour and a half back here after my wallet got jacked downtown and I couldn’t pay for a cab, and now the drunk guy on the corner who looks awful shady is watching me. Wake. The. Hell. Up.” You continue to plead, pounding on the door and ringing the buzzer but the night watchman’s snores are the only response. Fifteen minutes of knocking later, his dreams of being a ruthless drug-cartel jefe (boss) on a Mexican soap-opera are finally interrupted by you, and he makes his displeasure all too clear in his expression as he lets you in.

“Forgive me for coming back at one of the hours not included in your 24 HOUR ACCESS,” you say, but he’s already snoring, back in the Spanish version of One Life to Live as he finds out the police officer that arrested him is actually his half-twin-brother Raul who was thought to be dead*.

4) Have dogs/cats in the house that are not house trained, and/or birds that squawk earsplittingly loud at every bump in the night.

I generally like animals. But when I can’t sleep because Pedro the Parrot is on crack and feels the need to alert the entire building that a fly has entered the room, my head becomes filled with murderous thoughts of feathers strewn across the floor.

I’d have the cat do the dirty work for me, if I wasn’t already planning his demise after I stepped in something that belongs in a litter box or outside.

5) Use the bacteria infested closet in the back as a kitchen.

Of the many false claims hostels frequently make, the kitchen is almost always one of the greatest disappointments to me, as someone who likes to cook. A Coleman stove with one working burner, pots and pans warped beyond recognition, and three forks missing half the prongs does not qualify as a “fully equipped” kitchen. And that’s not even taking into account the general filth and grime that most budget hostel kitchens share that kills your appetite after glancing at it.

*There is no Spanish version of One Life to Live (that I know of). But if there was, I’m sure it’d have a ruthless drug-cartel jefe who gets arrested by his presumed-dead-half-twin-brother Raul.