If you’re planning to try to find accommodations on a budget while traveling in Europe, you’re probably looking into a variety of youth hostels, cheap hotels, and bed and breakfasts. While you might not mind the shared bathrooms and little beds that go along with inexpensive lodging on your travels, there is one amenity that you might not have considered: elevators. In Europe, many hostels and low-cost hotels are located in old buildings. That can certainly add to their charm and make your stay a lot more unique and interesting than standardized chain hotels, where all the rooms look pretty much the same no matter where in the world you are. You might be less charmed when you’re dragging your luggage up a long, narrow staircase to the fourth floor, however.
There are plenty of advantages to staying in a hostel, but convenience is not always one of them. While a fancy hotel will have porters and bellhops that will carry your bags to your room, at a hostel, the best you’re going to get is a luggage storage room or locker that you pay for. Unless you want to leave your luggage somewhere near the lobby for the entire stay, though, you’ll have to be prepared to haul your bags up yourself. You’ll probably want to do your best to travel light. If you can manage it, just bring one carry-on for your vacation.
Plan ahead to avoid long climbs to your room
If you have mobility issues and are planning a vacation or just don’t feel like trekking up a bunch of stairs after a long day of sightseeing, the best thing you can do is plan ahead. When you’re researching hostels, you should always read reviews from other travelers who have stayed there. They can be a great resource for finding out whether or not there are elevators since tired visitors before you will probably have vented their frustration online.
An even better solution is to simply call the hostel (or hotel) in advance and ask how many stairs you’ll have to climb to get to the room you’ve booked. It’s not always easy to tell how many flights of stairs are between a room and the lobby just from the room number. If you are from the United States, you are probably used to the first floor being the floor you enter from the street. In Europe, chances are that the first floor of the hotel is known as the ground floor, and you’ll still have to go up one flight of stairs to reach what is known as “the first floor.” In some hostels and hotels, you may also find that rooms that are considered to be one floor may have a few steps up in between them. If you ask about stairs when you book, the person at the front desk may be able to book you into a room on the ground floor — or at least give you a heads-up so you can start building that stamina!
