About us
The cooperative was founded in 2005 by a students' association at the University of Palermo. It started from the side of the person looking for somewhere to sleep, not from the side of whoever rents it out. Twenty years on, that is still how it decides.
The motto is not wordplay. Someone of sixty setting off with a rucksack has more in common with a twenty-year-old on the road than with a contemporary who stays home. That is why there are no student rates and no rooms for young people on this site: they would be the opposite of what we say.
On a booking portal the cheapest wins, and to be cheapest something has to be cut. We would rather be chosen for how things are organised: meals agreed, replies within two working days, a person on the phone. Anyone looking only for the cheapest bed will find better elsewhere.
A hostel is a means, not a destination. Nobody sets off to see a dormitory: people set off for Baratti, for Ferrara's walls, for a concert at the Regio. This site is built on that, which is why it talks more about places than about rooms.
The hostels share a way of working, not a manual. In Reggio the hostel sits inside a historic cloister with a restaurant open to the city; in Campiglia everyone eats in because outside there is the hillside; in Ferrara there are the walls. Those are differences, not inconsistencies. Whoever runs each one decides on the spot, because they are on the spot.
That somebody knows your name when you come back from the beach. That if the train gets in at half past eleven there is a door that opens. That if there is a coeliac in the group it is not a discovery at the first lunch.
These are small things and almost all of them are organisation. Ninety per cent of hospitality is decided before anyone arrives, and the remaining ten is being able to fix what goes wrong anyway.
We do not sell you a trip. We work so that you can live it well: it is the one sentence on this site worth defending.
How we workWhoever runs each hostel also sits on the board of the cooperative.
