Full Disclosure: I work for Eurotrip. But, yes, it is completely reliable. You will have no problems with your reservations. Hostels are used to getting online reservations now and reservations here go through major booking engines. The prices are as low as everywhere else and you help support the site

Bulldog is a party hostel — if that’s what you’re up for, it’s the place to be. Don’t expect a quiet night.

It’s really early for hostels to be booked. What hostels do you mean? I’ll check it out for you.

July is busy in Europe, but not as busy as August. The closer it gets to August the busier it gets. However, it’s really unlikely that many hostels are already fully booked for July, 2011.

I think the reason you’re finding “no availability” for July is that the hostels parcel out their available rooms/beds to several different hostel booking websites like this one. Most probably haven’t posted any rooms for next summer on the booking sites yet. If you check the individual hostels you will frequently find rooms/beds available for the next few weeks but “no availability” for dates more than about 2 months in the future — because the hostel hasn’t identified any available rooms to the booking site yet. Most hostels probably won’t release rooms/beds for next summer to the hostel booking sites until January.

Start checking again in January. I’d make the 1st and last night reservations and any reservations where you think you absolutely must stay in a particular hostel on a particular date about 6 to 8 weeks in advance — but you can usually reserve a hostel a week or so in advance without a problem.

I booked some hostels with Eurotrip for my trip this past summer and I had no problems at all. I used other online booking sites as well, and didn’t have any problems with missing reservations or anything like that.

As oldlady said above, rooms for July should not be booked up yet. We booked all our hostels ahead of time, but in March-April for a July/August trip and didn’t have any problems getting the hostels/type of rooms we wanted.

Cool, good to know it’s reliable, I will use this site to book.

I just typed in Amsterdam in the search bar on this site and looked for my dates (July 1 for 3 nights) and it said almost all of them were unavailable.

It sounds like based on your guys’ responses that the hostels just haven’t released rooms avaialble for booking as of yet. That sound right? Would it be best to wait a couple of months and see what opens up?

Yea, sounds like to me rooms just aren’t available for booking yet. I think I started looking around February last year because thats when my ticket was booked. I researched during spring break in March and then we booked in April and didn’t really have any problems with rooms being booked at the hostels we wanted.

I’d wait until January/February and then start checking back. Keep in mind that different websites usually get a certain number of rooms, so just because they are booked on this site, there might be rooms available on others.

I would wait until then anyway. If you book in January you’ll get a spot in any hostel you want — nothing will be booked. It will give you time to change your plans as well.

there should not be a problem booking in July.