Not Only Youth, German Hostels Now Want Whole Families

For a long time, “youth hostel” conjured up an image of noisy kids on school trips staying 10 to a room, with shower and other facilities shared by the whole floor and peppermint tea for breakfast. That doesn’t exactly sound like a vacation. But times have changed. Hostels are now marketing to families – and, according to Knut Dinter, spokesman for the German Youth Hostel Association (DJH), “more and more [families] are staying at hostels every year.” Families generally account for about a fifth of the total number of guests, and in some areas of the country it’s as much as a third.

Obviously, hostels are not going to appeal to all families, since a certain amount of sacrificed comfort is inevitable. "There is often very little space to put suitcases and clothing , sometimes just a locker you can’t fit a lot into,” says Torsten Kirstges of the Jade University of Applied Sciences in Wilhelmshaven. "And instead of double beds, the parents have to sleep in bunk beds.” Plus, there are only a few rooms with their own toilet and shower.

DJH speaker Dinter agrees, but points out that – with the family market in mind -- hostels are making big investments to upgrade bathroom facilities. Winning the family market is increasingly important to the establishments since class trips are no longer as routine as they once were and hence the traditional market is on the decline.

Hostel owner Kerstin Krause says that is indeed the case. Together with her husband Ronald, she has spent the past 17 years running the “Waldkater” hostel in the town of Thale in central Germany’s Harz region. "When we started out, we mainly got school kids and college students staying here,” she says. But things started to change in the 1990s, and now the hostel has an unusually high number of family guests. Says Krause: "In 2011 for the first time we actually got more families than school classes.” And that trend continues to snowball – when one family has a good experience they tell friends, who often then decide to book a holiday with their families.

The 200-bed “Waldkater” hostel now has a number of families as regular customers. The facility offers packages for families that include children-friendly activities like movies, mini-golf, hikes. It even employs its own director of kids’ activities.

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