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Hostel Holiday   K    www.hostel.ru    St. Petersburg, Russia   Phone: 7 (812) 327-1070

Peak Season Rates: Single room $37; double room $19; dorm room $14. (A dorm room can have up to 6 beds.) Prices include breakfast. They also have a couple more luxurious double rooms for $50. (We didn't see these.)

Location Rating: Good. Close to the metro, a square, stores, cafes, the river.

Proximity to Metro: Very good. A 6 to 8 minute walk to Ploshchad Lenina Metro Station.

Lobby Appearance: Clean. Interesting maps of Russia and Saint Petersburg are in the nearby corridor.

Room Appearance: Very basic. This isn't a hotel. It's a hostel intended for students. The place is old, but very clean. The atmosphere in the rooms is completely plain. The rooms are spacious and bare except for the beds, a small desk or two, a couple chairs and a mirror on the wall. That's it.

Useful Nearby Businesses: You don't need to walk far to buy food and other ordinary things.

Hotel Restaurants: They have a plain looking communal kitchen where you prepare your own food.

Other Amenities: Communal satellite TV room, piano room, ping pong room.

Would I Stay Here? I don't like the idea of sharing a room with other people, so I wouldn't. But for someone of limited means it offers a clean bed for a price substantially less than most hotels.

Staff Speaks English? Yes.

Comments: The young woman at the front desk spoke English very well and was very pleasant. A security guard is stationed at the entrance. The rooms do not have bathrooms. The floors have separate shower rooms with private shower stalls which are fairly nice and new looking. On the fourth floor is a terrace with a nice view of the Neva River. It looks like a nice hangout spot (when it is warm). The entire facility is clean, but very basic. They say in the summer their 150 bed facility is full. Diagonally behind the building I noticed razor wire on top of a tall, old brick wall, and an old, dark, decaying building behind it. It turns out there is a small prison right there. The prison works as a temporary warehouse for prisoners with maximum stays intended to be 6 months as court cases work their way through the legal system. Russian prisons have a serious health problem with the spread of tuberculosis. Inmate cells intended for 2 people instead house 10. I have heard the conditions are quite bad. I asked a doctor who is familiar with the hostel's close proximity to the prison if guests of the hostel would be at risk of catching tuberculosis from being near the prison. She is very certain there is no risk because sunlight kills the germ. So in summary, the location has some pluses and one undesirable neighbor. It's very close to the metro. The beds are cheap. And the place is clean, but it is very, very basic. What would you expect for $14?

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