I've worked in several backpacker hostels in a couple of countries and stayed in many in many countries. Many, perhaps most, offer twin, double, and even family rooms, as well as dormitories.
But I always travel alone or with one friend and I do stay in dorms. I've never had to search online for a family room. Now a friend is asking about family rooms in hostels in Japan.
Many accommodation search engines cover hostels but they usually have one of two problems:
- They mainly focus on hotels and mix the hostels in with the hotels, and mainly focus on double rooms. Finding dorm prices is hard with these sites. I'm not yet sure how they are at family rooms in hostels. Examples: Booking.com and Agoda
- They mainly focus on young people staying in dorms or double rooms and don't make it easy or possible to search for family rooms. Examples: Hostels.com and Hostelworld.com
There are also sites for specific chains of hostels such as YHA and HI, but they only allow you to check for the few hostels in any locale that are part of the chain, though they do have proper support for looking up family rooms.
So my question is, is there any such site, or any such method, that would work for finding hostels with family rooms in Japan that you know of?
(In case you're wondering why, hostels can be considerably cheaper than hotels and are usually also more social.)