REVIEW: Yoho Hostel, Salzburg

Last weekend's travels took me and three girlfriends out of Germany (only just!) to the beautiful Austrian city of Salzburg. Now, before I hit you all with a big ole post of our weekend antics - and trust me, ya don't wanna miss it - allow me to share a review of the hostel in which we stayed for our two nights in the city of The Sound of Music and Mozart: Yoho Hostel.

For the sake of easy reading, I shall take the liberty of indulging my inner organisational freak and divide my review into pros and cons (but don't worry, I'm not going to go so far as to alphabetise them. That would just be weird GAAAD who does that? Ahem.)

So, here we go!

The showers

POSITIVES

• Location: Situated in between the station and the main city centre, about five to ten minutes walk to each, Yoho really is fabulously located in Salzburg. It's also five minutes from both our fave new cocktail bar and the awesome traditional Austrian club (yes, really... I'll explain more in my post about the trip!) which we may have frequented... Supermarket and corner shop both nearby too. Jolly convenient.
• Friendly staff: Irrelevant to us as we are all totes fluent German speakers (ish), but they all spoke English too. The reception was open all night, and you could check-in from 11am which is very handy.
• Nice interior and rooms: The hostel was clean, it had a cool bar, there are posters of pretty Salzburg sights round the corridors and our room was fine - not overly exciting but all we needed. I like that they do small dorms too: as a group of four we had a room to ourselves - a double bunk bed (weird but kinda cool), a wardrobe, wash-basin with mirror, table and two chairs. Oh, and the beds had proper duvets and were comfy!
• Good and free wifi: Absolute essential for me!
• Good and cheap breakfast: We weren't planning on having the hostel breakfast both mornings, but after enjoying it on our first day, we realised we'd be fools not to do so again. It's 3,50 Euros (cheap compared to a lot of hostels!) and is a buffet (GET IN!) of cereals, yoghurt, fruit, toast, bread rolls, hams, cheese and lots of different spreads, as well as unlimited teas, coffees, fruit juices and water. You may think I'm strange for including water in the list but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get free water ANYWHERE so it was a bit of a treat at breakfast. We filled ourselves up so well we then managed to keep going until early dinner time, thus saving lunch money HOORAH!
• Yoho has a free luggage storage room.
• KITCHENS! I've stayed in many a hostel where there are no facilities to prepare your own food. Brilliantly, Yoho provides a big fridge, microwave and kettles for its guests, as well as cutlery and crockery - obviously we brought our own teabags and made the most of the facilities.
• The Sound of Music screening: Every night. 7pm. Amazing. (We loved it!)
• Happy hour: At Yoho bar from 6-7pm and 10-11pm with nice cheap drinks for the taking.
• Good showers: The idea of shared showers and loos is not one I instinctively love, but they were really good at Yoho. The showers were clean, nice and powerful. There was never a queue (although this was in January and thus not exactly peak time), and there were hairdryers provided too. Pleasing.
• Free useful map: Yoho offer their own map of the city which we found really handy - they point out their favourite haunts, the main attractions, and show three different walking tour routes to see the best of Salzburg. Despite going through about five maps over the weekend thanks to the snow and rain turning them to mush, it was really useful.
• A good price: We paid 37,50 Euros each for two nights, which may not make Yoho the cheapest hostel in which I've ever stayed, but I still think it's not bad at all.

Nice clean corridors

NEGATIVES

• The curtains: When drawn, in our room they covered about half the window. To be fair, I'm being picky and this wasn't too much of a problem what with it being January, but I imagine in the summer it would be more annoying when the light comes streaming in at 5am.
• Not enough toilets: Again, I'm being fussy, but we could've perhaps done with a few more and it would've been nice if they were gender-segregated.
• Only one socket in our room: There were four of us, each with phones to charge, yet only one electric socket. Not the best.
• Check-out is at 10am: Again not too much of an issue, but should you be wanting to lie in after a long Dirndl-wearing night out (just us?) you alas shan't be able to. 

And there you have it! As you can see from the length of each section, I'd really recommend Yoho hostel - the negatives are really only very minor things and the positives are much more important. I think it's great when a hostel has a nice atmosphere which encourages its guests to chat, and that's exactly what we had at Yoho. It was just what we needed for our weekend in Salzburg!