When is an International hostel NOT international?

When it's run by Americans in America.

As an axiom, USA hostels are the pits. They work effortlessly at being so. They are overpriced, poorly staffed (usually starting with the owner), inhospitable, racist, and proudly cheap in every sense of the derogatory word.

While hostels typically rank as small businesses there is scant home-spun coziness about them in the States. American owners/managers run them under the auspices of hotels for naïve youth with little money and, so, tend to charge hotelesque rates; but since hostels are not hotels one is made to feel "Oh well, I get what I pay for"; and what one gets is usually sub par if not downright rank.

Owners don't feel obliged to be courteous or professional because, after all, it ain't the Ritz Carlton. This inferiority complex is what colours everything bad about USA hostels. Common things like customer service, basic amenities, cleanliness/maid service are regarded as luxuries befitting big spenders---not Australian backpackers or German youth on holiday. So the Front Desk is saucy and untrained, the cleaning lady doesn't speak English and likely hasn't a Green card, and you will

rarely see a black employee unless he's 6'2" and/or clobbered with dreadlocks to make it VERY clear to foreigners, This is a black man!

Next to black Americans the other unwanted group is---drumroll please---Americans. For some ass backwards reason hostels in the USA don't cotton to American travellers. What, what? Perhaps management fears losing the International Hostel decal if it admits non-foreign guests.

Or perhaps management is just stupid and racist---and profit-motivated.

I was routinely charged a steep(er) "key" deposit whereas non-Americans were not. At any rate what key costs more than $10?

It would be great if American hostelers actually travelled abroad themselves and gained perspective on how to operate a nice, clean, affordable lodging, instead of smoking pot and basking in their sorry hippy delusions of cool. Unlike the ones in America, hostels in Europe and Turkey tend to not smell of piss and feet, tend to not look of piss and feet, and don't cost you an arm and a leg.

Now if they could just learn to pay the heating bills....