The Hostelz.com Review
Cambie Hostel, located in the Gastown district of downtown Vancouver, is a great social hub and loads of fun!
The Location
The hostel is close to grocery stores, restaurants, shopping, and all amenities that you may require while staying in Vancouver. The rooms in the hostel are located on the first and second floor above a pub, which gives the hostel an extremely social environment. If you are looking for a great party hostel, this is the place for you. If you are looking for somewhere that is relatively quiet where your sleep won't be disturbed, it is probably best for you to not stay here. Another perk of the Cambie Hostel is that they are located next door to their bakery and every morning you get a free tea or coffee and a muffin for breakfast.
Rooms and Bathrooms
The rooms are very spacious and the beds are fabulous. Each dorm room has a double bed with mattresses of high quality for each individual. For a backpacker, this is quite a luxury after spending lots of time in single beds. The bathrooms on each floor have two toilets and two showers in each gender's bathroom on each floor. They are in a very clean condition and are tended to daily.
Common Spaces
There are not a great deal of large common spaces in this hostel. There is the small kitchen and common room, which has cooking utensils, a microwave and a stove, a television, and two computers for connecting to the internet. Wi-Fi is free all over the hostel if you have your own device to access the internet, you just need to get the password from the front desk. The largest space common to the hostel but also accessible to regular members of the public is the bar downstairs -- this is always a great place to meet people and to socialize.
Summary
The staff who work on the front desk are super helpful with any questions or requests that you may have. Security for the hostel and the rooms is great. To get into the hostel at night, you need a key to the front door, a key card to access each floor and a different key again to access your room. The rooms also have lockers to put your stuff in for security purposes -- you just need to supply a lock. Overall, this a great hostel!
The Location
The hostel is close to grocery stores, restaurants, shopping, and all amenities that you may require while staying in Vancouver. The rooms in the hostel are located on the first and second floor above a pub, which gives the hostel an extremely social environment. If you are looking for a great party hostel, this is the place for you. If you are looking for somewhere that is relatively quiet where your sleep won't be disturbed, it is probably best for you to not stay here. Another perk of the Cambie Hostel is that they are located next door to their bakery and every morning you get a free tea or coffee and a muffin for breakfast.
Rooms and Bathrooms
The rooms are very spacious and the beds are fabulous. Each dorm room has a double bed with mattresses of high quality for each individual. For a backpacker, this is quite a luxury after spending lots of time in single beds. The bathrooms on each floor have two toilets and two showers in each gender's bathroom on each floor. They are in a very clean condition and are tended to daily.
Common Spaces
There are not a great deal of large common spaces in this hostel. There is the small kitchen and common room, which has cooking utensils, a microwave and a stove, a television, and two computers for connecting to the internet. Wi-Fi is free all over the hostel if you have your own device to access the internet, you just need to get the password from the front desk. The largest space common to the hostel but also accessible to regular members of the public is the bar downstairs -- this is always a great place to meet people and to socialize.
Summary
The staff who work on the front desk are super helpful with any questions or requests that you may have. Security for the hostel and the rooms is great. To get into the hostel at night, you need a key to the front door, a key card to access each floor and a different key again to access your room. The rooms also have lockers to put your stuff in for security purposes -- you just need to supply a lock. Overall, this a great hostel!
— Exclusive Hostelz.com Review
March 2012
Their Description
Cambie Hostel - Gastown Details
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Cambie Hostel - Gastown Reviews from the WebHostelz.com Guest Reviews
Certainly a memorable stay. found the cambie to be far more charming then i expected given some of the negative statements. Be warned that the bathrooms arent the cleanest, but the rooms were clean and the everyone was helpful. i was worried that the neighborhood was going to be rough, but it ended up being awesome. very colorful indeed. i would recommend it to anyone who wants to come home with some stories, and a little adventure. — nick , us (2008-09-01) Hmmm this place has always been good to me when traveling to whistler to visit friends or hitchhiking on the island. I believe that timing is everything with life and that is how you should take this place. — Ian , Canada (2007-10-05) Never Stay Here I took the train up from Seattle to see Vancouver for the first time and literally stayed only one day thanks, in part, to this scary, nasty hostel. First off, it is in Gastown off Hastings, which means it's on the edge of Vancouver's skid row. There was garbage literally waste high in the alley next to it -- and rats. When I checked in at the front counter they told me they did have lockers for bags but I'd have to buy a lock. 5 bucks for this useless combo lock that you could break just by staring at it hard. The lockers in my room were ancient high school lockers that were just propped against one wall. Only one of the three lockers actually had a functioning handle on it and so I had to cram my backpack in that. The door to the room I was in looked like it had been popped so many times, it barely worked. The women's bathroom had two showers, absolutely no hooks or shelves to put your clothes any where while you showered and two toilets -- one of which was leaking and there was a nice puddle of water on the floor the whole night. I was "lucky" because I booked on a Tuesday night and got a four bunk bed room all to myself. There was no fan in the room and nothing but the nasty air from the open window which overlooked the giant pile of garbage in the alley. Every single time someone opened or closed a door on my floor or walked down the hallway, you heard it. There was no insulation on any of the doors and so I got to listen to doors slam open and shut all night. The Cambie's bar is touted as having "cheap drinks" on their website. What a joke! I had one draft beer and it was $4.50. And the bartender was rude. And, I'd say 50% of the people sitting in the bar were there to sell drugs. Speaking of drugs, I didn't see or smell pot the whole time I was in Gastown but I got four offers to buy heroin while I was down there. The skeevy little dealers would come rolling down the street on bikes and ask you point-blank if you wanted to buy some heroin. — Mel , USA (2007-09-07) This is, by far, the worst hostel either of us have stayed in, and having clocked up over thirty different hostels between us, thats saying something! Although the price is reasonable, the hostel really isnt worth it -- after one night we're having to look for somewhere else, even if it means paying more! The rooms are badly in need of a facelift, with lockers that dont lock and doors that you have to kick open -- they frequently stick. The calibre of the guests here is not high, making us feel very uncomfortable about even walking around the hostel. The corridors look like they came straight out of The Omen, and the bathrooms were ages away, with only one bathroom per floor. And dont even get us started on the kitchen -- grossly under stocked, with no basic necessities such as washing up sponge or tea towel. And with a grand total of two plastic bowls for crockery. This would be fine if you were planning on eating out or eating microwave meals the whole time, but as we were planning on cooking every night, there is no way we could have put up with this. — Becky and Lynsey , UK (2007-05-09) Well located, the hostel has a great bar at the main floor. But this bar can be noisy if you want to sleep. The place is not that clean but if you don't care and prefer to focus on having a good time having a drink, this is for you! — French guy (2006-11-16) Don't go here! I've traveled Canada for four weeks and all the places I stayed in were much much better then this place! Arriving after a flight from Toronto, the guy at the desk wasn't that friendly and the room wasn't that clean. If you like loud music from the bar/disco downstairs, be my guest to stay there! But when you want to sleep stay out of this place cause you can sing along with every song you here from inside your bed! Breakfast isn't that great; you'll get a muffin! Staff isn't that friendly, the neighbourhood is pretty eccentric, and there are too little showers, so prepare yourself for waiting a long time after a bad nights sleep! When you can avoid this place; avoid it! Vancouver has great hostels; after one night in the Cambie I found a great place where I'd stayed for three more days! — Tessa (2006-08-20) Don't stay here if it is the last place left in Vancouver -- sleep in the street -- it would certainly be much cleaner. My boyfriend and I have been travelling round the world for the last couple of years and this is by far the grossest place we've had the misfortune to stay in. We booked a double room and after only two hours asleep, woke up to find the bed infested with bedbugs -- and not just a couple -- there were at least twenty crawling around and at least four different species. It was obvious that they hadn't just popped up over night -- the place had clearly been infested for days. We went to the reception staff at one a.m. to check out and the man at the desk had the audacity to ask us why it had taken us so long to notice! He wasn't shocked to hear that the place was crawling and obviously didn't care. He wasn't even going to give us any money back until I mentioned that we had taken pictures of the bed crawling with bugs. Even then he only gave us back a partial refund. The next morning we discovered we were covered in bites -- thank god we woke up only after two hours asleep. What makes me really angry is that I can guarantee the room had someone else in it the next night with nothing having been done about the infestation. We've stayed in a large range of places on our trip and this place is the worst hostelling experience we have had and gives a bad name to hostelling in general. — Nikki (2006-08-07) A really sh*tty place. I arrived there early in the morning and was instantly hassled by the pride of the DTES (down town east side) mob who tried to tell me smack before i got to the door. The staff at the hostel are therefor very paranoid about who gets into the hostel considering the colourful characters hanging by their doors so you might get a pretty rude welcome. The hostel itself is pretty sh*tty - overcrowded rooms and poorly maintained facilities. On my first night I was welcomed into my room by 4 strange smelling old canadian men smoking weed till about 3 in the morning. They said they were long termers - kind of reminded me of a prison. Then at 6 that same morning a schizo hooker climbed the tree outside my window and started screaming into the room for money - pretty representative for the whole area really. I packed up the next day and moved to the much better cambie seymour. AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE - WHICH IM SURE MOST OF THE RESIDENTS ALREADY HAVE. — JEN 06 (2006-07-14) if u dont like it a little rough then dont stay here. however i dont mind it and so this place was sweet for the price (18 a night, 15 a night if u stay a week). wasnt the cleanest hostel, and had odd couches and a stove that was a little dodge but you get a double bed, so u win some, u lose some. if u like to do it cheaper and dont mind it a little rough come here for sure. a little out of the town centre though, but the downstairs pub was sweet and free breakfast was decent. — daniel h (2006-05-16) The Cambie Gastown is a great place to stay. I also stayed at Grand Trunk, Pender Lodge, and C&N Backpackers but the Cambie was the best by far. They have a great bar downstairs with great drink specials. It was the safest hostel I stayed at. They had automatic locks on the main floor, then another on each level, locks for each room of course, and lockers inside the rooms. The rooms were spacious, and the beds were fairly comfortable and clean. The bathrooms were clean, but the showers didn't provide much privacy, which some people may not like. Also, they had a shared refrigerator for everyone and a lack of kitchen equipment (not many bowls, cups, plates, etc.) That was the only negative thing I can say about this place. The location might also be a little too seedy for some. It was not far from the notorious Main and Hastings intersection. Overall, the Cambie kicked ass and I would recommend it to anyone. — Ryan (2005-09-23) I stayed in the Cambie Hostel for four nights in August and September 2005. Beside the nice breakfast in the cafe next door, I could not find anything to like there. There was a mouse in my room, a broken window, street noise, bar noise, beggers and drug-addicts outside the building, shabby furniture, hairs on pillow, etc. — Vera (2005-09-12) I had a really good time at this hostel, I didn't even mind the mice that live in the common room. Some of the women that work in the bar are very rude, and some of the guys are a little too keen for a date. Aside from all of this, the type of people who come to stay here are very friendly and loads of fun. On the facilities side of things, the toilets and showers often didn't work, and the kitchen is kind of bad. BUT I would still stay here again because I had so much fun. — Anonymous (2005-07-29) I stayed at the Cambie in June 2004. It was great. I'm from Montreal — there are some cool pubs there!! But the Cambie is hard to beat. I'm coming back in May 2005 before the fruit season starts in the Okanagan Valley. See you there, people. P.s. it's a great place to meet chicks. ;-) — Anonymous (2005-02-17) September 2004: East Hastings is a seedy place to be, but the Cambie is the best!!! The bathrooms are a little dirty, but the common room was awesome. It's a great place to see the playoffs and meet people.
Cheers. — Briar (2004-12-14) The hostel itself is fine, but the front desk staff (both women we dealt with) are cranky and unhelpful. VERY IMPORTANT: We parked adjacent to the hostel and our car was broken into--back window smashed, when there was absolutely nothing to steal! This area is overrun with drug addicts. The police and shop people referred to it as "our drug problem." I will NEVER stay in this area again. — Sept 2004 Visitor (2004-09-07)