Hotels vs. Hostels in Vienna, Austria

The combination of the White Sox being home and my working about an hours drive north of Wrigley Field has kept my sporting events attendance at bay this week. Instead of attending, I began planning the hotel portion of our upcoming trip to Switzerland and Austria for Euro Cup 2008.

We are spending 4 nights in Switzerland and 3 nights in Vienna, Austria. Since we have more time and flexibility in Switzerland I chose to spend my time researching Vienna hotels.

We already have tickets for the quarterfinal match in Vienna, Austria on Sunday, June 22 so we have to spend the weekend in Vienna rather than seeing any other portion of Austria. After a quick glance at the following websites I decided that hotels in Vienna were too expensive.

1) hotels.com: most rooms were above $300 per night and I would have to do a lot of research to determine whether they were in good locations.
2) karenbrown.com: had 3 preferred hotels that were around the 150 euro price range. I would have to call to find out if they were full during the popular weekend.
3) tablethotels.com: none of their Vienna hotels had availability.
4) venere.com: rooms seemed pricey.

The cost and lack of options prompted me to logon to hostelworld.com. I booked a hostel through the website when I flew to Paris for a few days to watch the French Open in 2005. While staying at the hostel I met a lot of recent college graduates and had a great time. Thus, I broached the subject to the Ultimate Sports Wife. I had multiple reasons for staying in the hostel:

1) We were planning to tour Vienna pretty heavy in the two days we had and would not spend much time in the hotel.
2) It would be fun to meet some people in the hostel. It is much harder to meet people in hotels. Plus we would be in bunk beds in a room of 4 – it is really easy to meet people when they are staying in your room!
3) It was only $120 per night for both of us vs. the mid $300’s per night.

Nicole did not jump at the idea. I think the bunk beds did her in so I continued to do some more hotel research. I went back to Venere.com and found a decent looking hotel (Hotel Adlon) for 149 Euros per night ($235). We decided that at only twice as much as the hostel that the hotel was the way to go.