Home » Hostels in Cambodia

This country is becoming more popular with Western tourists every year and so the amount of hostels in Cambodia is going up all the time, even though there still aren’t many in most of the country. The two major tourism spots in the country are Siem Reap and the capital of Phenom Penh, and both of these are excellent stops for the Cambodia hostel crowd. Siem Reap has the majority of the traditional hostels in Cambodia, as well as a ton of hotel rooms that are cheap enough that they appeal to the Cambodia hostel crowd.

The main reason there aren’t more hostels in Cambodia yet is you can still get a private room for under US$5 per person in most cities. These places tend to be very basic and sometimes quite run down so we are looking forward to the day when more proper Cambodia hostels open up with clean beds and good common lounge areas and so forth.

Of course, there are many hotels and guesthouses that will be listed on the Cambodia hostels pages, but you have to look closely at what’s on offer. This country has recently filled up with hundreds of concrete Western-style hotels that are all identical. They are usually aimed at and filled up by the package bus tour crowd, and that has forced many of the other hotels to compete for the budget traveler.

Some of these cheap hotel rooms listed on the Cambodia hostels pages are quite nice, but others are not. You usually get what you pay for when booking a place in this country, as long as you do it yourself. Cambodia, and several other countries in this region have a similar problem where competition among hotels is so great they resort to paying hefty commissions to taxi and motorbike drivers who brings unsuspecting tourists there.

Now, getting a hotel or hostel recommendation from a taxi driver seems harmless enough, but over time the system has developed such that the worst and emptiest hotels and hostels in Cambodia have the most incentive to bribe the taxi drivers. This means you end up being taken to a lousy place and then pay perhaps double their normal rates to pay the commission to whomever brought you there.

The best way to avoid this is to carefully consider your hotel in advance and book ahead. The drivers will ask if you have a reservation and if you do they will take you to the place you ask because they want the taxi fare as well. But if you intend on staying at a popular place and then ask a taxi or motorbike driver to take you there you’ll be told the place is closed or sold out or burned down, but he knows a better place that he highly recommends.

This is a common scam in Southeast Asia and an easy one to avoid if you know about it in advance. The listings for the hotels and hostels in Cambodia on these pages give you all the information you need to make a good choice, and they offer the best prices you can find anywhere.

• Home
• Countries