The Boc Hostels City - Youth Hostel

I was okay with my stay, but for the price I think there’s room to improve. The rooftop shuts at 17:00, which is a shame, and there aren’t many places to hang towels to dry. The rooms and beds are spacious, and the pool and other facilities are great, but the place feels more like a hotel than a hostel. There are no organised activities apart from a bar crawl twice a week, so it can be hard to meet people if that’s not your thing. The location is okay, though I didn’t really go out after dark because the neighbourhood didn’t feel very safe to me. Staff friendliness varied by person, and wasn’t great across the board. More social activities would bring out the place’s potential.

The pod-style beds gave me lots of privacy and were more spacious and comfortable than most hostel bunks I’ve used. Each bed has a free locker, opened with the same key card you get at check-in. The hostel was very clean, and the staff were friendly. It’s about a 10-minute walk to the beach, and the old town isn’t far; there are also plenty of little shops nearby for anything you need. The rooms were quite warm, though I didn’t find it too bothersome. It might be more of an issue in summer. One of the best hostels I’ve stayed in, and I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone visiting Palma.

I’d put this hostel at around 3.5 or 4 out of 5. The pool area is nice and clean, and the toilets and showers are spacious and separate. Sleeping pods are large, with curtains and little lights inside. Lockers have plenty of room, though the top shelf is hard to reach if you’re under 6ft. Some things need work. The kitchen gets very hot when lots of people are cooking, and the exhaust fans need fixing. The sensor lights in the rooms are frustrating, a regular switch would be better. Doors are incredibly loud opening and closing at night. The smoking area sits in the middle of the hostel, right by the windows to all the rooms. With ten people in a room it gets hot, so opening a window means smelling smoke from people out late. The pool and rooftop close at 5pm, even though sunset is after 9pm and it’s still above 20degrees then.

The pool area was nice, and the place was clean. That was the good part. Nights were unbearably hot, and I had to go downstairs to ask them to turn on the air conditioning. Even then, I don’t think they actually switched it on. I couldn’t open the window because people talked in the courtyard all night, and the noise carried through the whole building. Every night I went to ask reception to get people to go inside. They only reluctantly agreed, around 130am, and I had to go down again at 430am when people came back and got loud. They don’t enforce their own 11pm to 8am quiet hours, so keep that in mind. If getting decent sleep before the next day matters to you, save your money and stay somewhere else.