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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:

  1. 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
  2. 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.)

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  • What's wrong with just searching for family rooms and ordering the results by increasing price? You would expect the cheapest options, including "hostels" to be at the top of the list.
    – fkraiem
    Jan 7, 2019 at 4:20
  • It would also help to know how many persons we are talking about. (Japan can be very strict about the number of allowed persons per room.)
    – fkraiem
    Jan 7, 2019 at 4:21
  • Please elaborate on "just". Do you mean by typing "family rooms hostels tokyo" into Google? Or are you aware of a family room option on Hostelworld or some other site?? Most hostel family rooms in most countries where I'm familiar with them are for two adults and two or three children.
    – hippietrail
    Jan 7, 2019 at 4:26
  • Probably any room for 3+ people would be considered a family room in Japan. I don't know about Hostelworld; I always use Rakuten Travel for my bookings in Japan and you can search by number of persons.
    – fkraiem
    Jan 7, 2019 at 4:54
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    Here is one example of what I find in Kyoto for 2 adults and 2 children, about 14,000 yen per night (total).
    – fkraiem
    Jan 7, 2019 at 5:00

1 Answer 1

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Actually, it turns out that the regular hostel search engines do allow you to search for private rooms specifically, and sometimes for family rooms even more specifically. But on all of them you have to do an initial search, and only then can you access the "filters" that let you specify room type. This was not straightforward to me, and I thought I was pretty experienced at hostels and Internet. Maybe this is completely obvious to some people but hopefully this answer will still be useful for other people like me who didn't realize you could do this.

HostelWorld

hostelworld filter

Does let you look specifically for family rooms.

HostelBookers

hostelbookers filter

Doesn't let you look specifically for family rooms, but you can at least search for private rooms for 4 or more people. After that you'd have to dig further into the page for each property.

Hostels.com

hostels.com filter

Does let you look specifically for family rooms.

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