Terms of use

The short version

• Hostello is a directory

  We publish listings and check them. We are not a party to any agreement between you and a hostel, we do not hold rooms, we do not take deposits, and we take no money from students.

• The listing is the owner information

  Rents, facilities, mess menus and contact details are typed by the owner. We check them at review and they can change afterwards. Confirm everything on the call and again on the visit.

• An enquiry is not a booking

  Sending an enquiry tells a hostel you are interested and passes on your first name, your university and your message. It reserves nothing and it holds no room for you.

• Your review is yours

  You own what you write. An owner can reply once and can never remove it. We remove a review only if it names a private individual or contains a threat, and we say so publicly when we do.

• You can leave

  Delete your account at any time from your account settings. What happens to what you wrote is set out in the privacy policy.

Using the site

You may browse the directory without an account. An account is required to save a hostel, keep a record of an enquiry, write a review, or use roommate matching. You must be 16 or older to create one, and the details you give at signup must be your own.

One person gets one account. Do not create an account on behalf of a hostel in order to review it, review your own hostel, or ask anybody to write a review they did not earn. We remove accounts that do, along with everything written from them.

What we do not promise

We do not guarantee that a room is available, that the rent shown is current, that a hostel will honour anything it told you, or that any listing will remain on the site. We check listings before they go live. We cannot check what happens after you move in.

Distances on this site are measured in a straight line from the listing to the campus, not as a walking route. Where a listing shows a rating carried over from before Hostello collected reviews here, we say so on the listing rather than presenting it as a review score.

Money

Hostello never takes payment from a student. There is no service charge, no finder fee and no commission on your rent. Every payment you make goes to the hostel, and every dispute about a payment is between you and the hostel.

If somebody asks you to pay Hostello, or to pay for a room through Hostello, it is not us. Report it and we will take the listing down while we check.

Reviews and what you post

A review has to come from your own experience of the hostel, and you can write one only for a hostel where you hold a confirmed or completed enquiry. You get one review per hostel, which you can edit.

Do not name a private individual, post a phone number or an address that is not yours, threaten anybody, or post anything you know to be untrue. Other students can flag a review, and a review that collects enough flags is hidden while a person reads it. An owner can reply once and can never delete a review, including their own listing reviews.

Owners

Owners pay a flat fee to list. Paying it does not buy placement in search results, and there is no way to buy placement. A listing must describe the hostel that exists at the address given, be answered on the number provided, and use photographs of that building.

We remove a listing that asks students for money before a visit, that is answered by somebody who is not the owner or the warden, or that carries photographs of a different building. Where a report concerns safety, the listing comes down while we check.

Ending it

You can delete your account at any time. We can suspend an account or remove a listing that breaks these terms, and we will say why. If we ever stop running Hostello, we will say so on the site before we do.

Questions about these terms