Tickle Family Travels

Whilst, in my younger, backpacking days I have stayed in many hostels around the world, since having kids I had never considered booking a stay in a hostel, I suppose my mind links hostels with young people, drinking and an unsuitable family environment. I was WRONG!

When looking for accommodation in Copenhagen for 5 nights, I quickly realised that hotels for 2 adults and 2 children were going to be mega expensive. Now, I know, we are talking Copenhagen, Denmark, doesn’t exactly spring to mind as a cheap city break does it? However I had bagged flights with Ryanair for £350 (yes, for all four of us AND a suitcase), had completed copious amounts of reading and research and was set on going. So a solution to the accommodation problem needed to be found.

I often use Booking.com to research accommodation accompanied by reading Tripadvisor reviews. There I started to come across hostels in my search, the accompanying photos often depicted families, so I followed up with research on Tripadvisor discovering that many hostels in Copenhagen were marketed towards families.

There are several hostels in Copenhagen appealing to families, these include Danhostel Copenhagen, Steel House Copenhagen and Next House Copenhagen. We chose to book the Danhostel Copenhagen, for reasons I’ll explain below.

Our experience at the Danhostel Copenhagen was fantastic and we want to share that with other families who may be apprehensive about booking a hostel. 

So, what’s so great about a hostel over a hotel?? 

First it helps keep the budget down, we paid £643 for 5 nights for 4 people. Now, this may not sound cheap, but remember we are in Denmark, a hotel would have cost minimum £1000+ for a location further out of the centre.

It also provided an option to self-cater. We were aware food would be expensive in Copenhagen and wanted to be able to keep costs down during our stay. Danhostel had a fully-equipped kitchen available for all guests to use.

We booked a room for four with private bathroom. The room had two single beds (pushed together to make a double) and a bunk bed. It had all we needed, beds and the ensuite was important to us I no longer fancy a shared bathroom! Whilst the room is basic, there are definitely no frills, it was clean and we didn’t plan on spending much time in the room. You do have to make up the beds yourself, linen is provided at check-in but as you can see this wasn’t a big job.

We had a fantastic view!! As an absolute bonus we were allocated a room on the 10th floor facing the river, the view was spectacular. I would definitely recommend requesting a high floor with a river view if you book this hostel.

The highlight of the hostel from the kids point of view was the games room in the basement. Here we found table football and pool, there is no charge to play on these, so many games of table football occurred in the evenings! For younger children there is also a playroom with lots of toys for under 5yrs.

The hostel was only a 15 min walk from Copenhagen Central Station so really easy to access from the airport, and therefore also only 15mins walk to Tivoli Gardens. As it is at the river front there was a ferry stop within 5minutes walk which we used to travel up to the Little Mermaid Statue. Most of the city centre is also only within 10-15mins walk, so the location of the hostel is excellent.

We found the staff to be extremely helpful, we visited at the end of May, when there happened to be a heatwave putting temperatures soaring. There is no air-conditioning in the hostel and the windows did not open so the room was getting very hot. When speaking with the staff they kindly gave us a fan to put it the room at no charge, which was perfect for sleeping at night.

If, like we did, you get blessed with glorious sunshine during your visit on the the opposite riverbank to the hostel is the lido where you can swim in the river, there is also a grassed area here where people hang out in the evening and eat picnics – we ate takeaway pizzas here on several evenings.

We would definitely consider booking a hostel again as a family, and would certainly return to Danhostel in the future. Don’t let the word ‘hostel’ put you off booking, check the reviews and read the website carefully to see if it meets your needs. But if it does hostels are so much more budget-friendly for family stays than hotels so book that hostel!