The time has come – Wombat’s City Hostel London is now home to its own cosy coffee cove. Here, travellers and locals can meet, chat, chill, work and soak up the London weather.

After a fantastic reception in Vienna and Munich, London is the third city hostel in which Wombat’s Café opens its doors.

What awaits you here? A journey into the famous Viennese coffee house culture with the best brew on offer alongside an assortment of sweet and salty snacks. All of this, housed in gorgeously designed surroundings. The only thing missing are the infamously grumpy Viennese waiters. Luckily, in our café, you’ll only find a welcoming atmosphere.

We are serving our own Wombat’s roast (see here), a mix of fair-trade Brazilian and Indian arabica. We know precisely where our quality beans come from and we pay a fair price for them. These premium beans are roasted by experts at Kaffee Campus Krems, near Vienna.

Your coffee will be prepared to perfection by our trained baristas on Faema equipment – connoisseurs won’t be disappointed. Our snacks are just as special – we serve fine, homemade sweets and cookies from a local patisserie.

Enjoying an espresso, Wombat’s co-founder Marcus Praschinger puts it perfectly –

“London really has it all – but a peaceful haven with extraordinarily good coffee, authentic Viennese cosiness and a cosmopolitan, urban atmosphere is truly something unique.”

O’zapft is’: that’s how you celebrate in Munich. Wombat’s founder Marcus with Werner Fuchs (Hofbräu) opening hostel and beer keg!

From left to right: Josef “Sepp” Glasl (Urkern GmbH), Florian Reif (Communication Werksviertel), Marcus Praschinger (Wombat’s), Werner Fuchs (Hofbräu).

Come with us for a quick tour through the new hostel!

Welcome! The main entrance…

… the reception…

… the outdoor terrace…

… the dorms with the brandnew multifunctional bunkbeds…

… and the breakfast area.

Back to opening eve with womBEATS presenting Paula Carolina live…

… And Shane Ó Fearghail & The Host – As The Music Program’s Host.

Wombat’s City Hostel Munich Werksviertel features a cozy womBAR…

… with selected products from our partners Georg Grohs (Wieninger Wine) and Mike Neureither (Ottakringer Brauwerk).

It’s toasted, baby! Wombat’s great selection of signature toasts is waiting for you in Munich Werksviertel!

Life is back at Wombat’s and it feels good!

The late-summer travel business has regained momentum. And September has also been the month of big steps for the future of Wombat’s City Hostels.

In our homebase, the City Hostel Vienna “Naschmarkt”, we have developed and tested some new elements for an even more exciting Wombat’s experience. Let’s take a closer look:

Thank You For The Music!

What a great way to bring people together, what a great festival: Wombat’s was the proud official ho(s)tel partner of the amazing Waves Festival 2021. On September 11th, we were thrilled to use our Café area to host a live showcase of the great Slovenian band Freekind!

Co-operations with cultural events and hosting live shows in our City Hostels will play a big role in Wombat’s future. We love to connect with artists from the local and international scenes.

New Breakfast – It’s Tasty, Baby!

Once again, our guests in Vienna got to be our guinea pigs as they tested our new breakfast which offers a large variety of choices including options for our vegetarian and vegan guests. The results? They loved it! Here’s what you can expect at our new “tasty brekkie” in Vienna:

Choose your breakfast base! We offer “Classic” – with bread, ham, jam & butter or “Vegan“ -with bread, jam, hummus, margarine. Then pick any 2 extras for free – we have cheese, homemade porridge, vegetable sticks, yoghurt & granola and fresh fruit salad. Your tasty brekkie also comes with bottomless coffee or tea for only € 5.90.

What a great way to start am exciting day full of discoveries in a new city. In the upcoming months, we will be revamping Wombat’s Brekkie in our City Hostels Munich, City Hostel London and City Hostel Budapest as well. Enjoy!

Bar’s Open!

After far too long, we were also able to finally re-open our legendary womBAR in Vienna! Again, we used the time on hiatus to revise all our providers and offers. The re-opening brings great new products and services focusing on value and quality. Have a look at our new womBAR’s menu here or, if you are a fast reader in the video 👇

It feels very good to have life return into our hostels and to be able to again It feels great to have life return to our hostels and to resume our mission of bringing people together again. 😉

See you soon!

Unfortunately there is not only justice in this world and not everybody is blessed with health. Sadly, some people and families have to deal with severe strokes of fate that they cannot cope with on their own.
For this reason, we would like to pay tribute to the great work of Vienna’s mobile children’s hospice MOMO, which provides medical and psychosocial support to severely ill children aged 0-18 and their families. MOMO was founded in March 2013 by Caritas, CS Caritas Socialis and the mobile children’s nursing service MOKI-Wien. Since then, MOMO has cared for more than 314 families and it has been possible to help every family that needs help! Support from MOMO is free of charge, regardless of how often MOMO employees come to the families and how long they stay. The children’s hospice depends in large part on the support of voluntary donors.

We are very proud of our partnership with MOMO since June this year and now support the children’s hospice financially with 1000€ per year. A big thank you goes to Michaela Dimitriewicz, the wife of one of Wombat’s founders Sascha, who has been volunteering for MOMO for many years and has made us aware of this great institution! We would also like to praise all the other MOMO employees for their great work and their commitment and look forward to continuing our cooperation!

The Oktoberfest runs from Sept 21st – October 6th 2019

What do hostel workers need most after an exhausting summer season? A 16-day beerfest, along with a hostel full of intoxicated guests. NOT, you would think, but we actually still enjoy this.

There are the bizarre moments – like the guest we only saw wearing a helmet (“to avoid injuries when passing out”) or the guy wearing a zebra costume for breakfast. I asked him where he got that one from, to which he replied, “I don’t remember, I woke up in it.” Or the guy who returned at 3am with nothing but his underpants (he couldn’t tell how that happened, but we know it). We have seen it all, and whatever you do, we won’t tell your girlfriend. Here’s how to Oktoberfest:

Avoid the weekends.

Especially avoid Saturdays. Especially the Saturday on the second weekend, when FC Bayern has a home match. Do yourself a favour and go on a weekday. Even on a Tuesday afternoon, it’s still the biggest party on earth. It’s easier to find accommodation. You”ll have to line up less than an hour for the rollercoasters, you’ll get inside the tents without lining up for hours and a free spot at a table will be much easier to find as well.

Don’t try to reserve a table

Because they don’t accept table reservations when the tent is likely to be full anyway. You just enter the tent of your choice. Scan it for empty spots and ask the other people on the table “ist hier frei?” – that’s it, and it’s also a good conversation starter.

First eat, then drink!

Oktoberfest beer is stronger than the regular stuff. It can get quite warm in the tents, so you will be thirsty and might drink more than you intended. The salt on the pretzels will do the rest. Start your day with a hearty lunch – I recommend one of the many beer halls. Augustiner Bräustuben (http://www.braeustuben.de/) serves excellent pork knuckle for just €9,20. The alcohol will hit you in a much more enjoyable way when you have some lardy food in your stomach.

Leave your stuff at the hostel

The Oktoberfest throng is a pickpocket’s paradise. You won’t want to be paranoid all the time about the contents of your pockets. Also leave your eyeglasses at home, you know, drunk people sometimes throw around their arms in a somewhat uncontrolled manner…

First rollercoaster, then binge drinking

Have mercy on me. I don’t want the contents of your digestive system raining down on me when I queue up. Please!
Still, if you are not yet completely wasted, sneaking out of the tent after the first Maß and go for a ride on the giant carousel or one of the rollercosters is definitely worth the experience.

Which tent?

There are 14 big ones and 20 small ones altogether with seats for 100,000. The first one you’ll see at the main entrance is the Hippodrom, well known for its champagne bar (WTF?) and the occasional celebrity visitor. Schottenhamel is a large one (it seats 10,000) and the tent where it all starts when the mayor taps the first keg. The biggest one is Paulaner Festzelt (capacity 10,900). The best about it is the large outdoor area on its southern side, so you can enjoy the autumn sun. The locals’ favourite is still Augustiner, the only one left tapping the beer from traditional wooden kegs. The tent where the shit really hits the fan is Hofbräu – like the Hofbräuhaus beer hall it’s very popular with tourists who intend to party hard. Mind that the waitresses will ask you to leave when you have an empty stein in front of you and refuse to replace it with a full one immediately. All the tents come with very cheesy oompah-style brass music playing traditional Bavarian songs like “Sweet Home Alabama” or “Country Roads”. You will certainly hate it until you’ve finished your fifth stein, then you’ll love it.

Don’t go to the wine tent

This is a BEERfest, for chrissake! Don’t be a nerd and drink wine. You just don’t!!!

Try not to pass out

The tents close just before midnight and those who can’t make it on their own legs any more will be brought to the slope under the “Bavaria” statue by the security guys. There are hundreds of “Bierleichen” lined up there every evening and the pickpockets will leave you with nothing but your underpants. You have been warned!

All in all the most important thing is to have fun. Go out and party hard!

Talking about diversity!

Have you ever read a slogan and thought it describes the core of your existence perfectly? ‘United in Diversity’ was the slogan of Life Ball and could not have been a better match. Life Ball is an astounding charity project to help fight HIV and prejudices in society.
Throughout the years it had grown to be one of Vienna’s most renown annual events. Celebrating diversity and tolerance. We have been supporting this amazing event through a collaboration as accommodation sponsor since 2013.
Back then Chris was the manager of wombat’s THE BASE in Vienna and also volunteered at the Life Ball. Furthermore there was always a good crowd of wombat’s staff volunteering or just partying at the Life Ball. No wonder the idea of this collaboration was welcomed with open arms and actually felt like a thing we had to do anyway.

A core connection

A couple of month ago Gerry Kessler announced that this year would be the last Life Ball. It made us recap the last years and we asked ourselves why we actually never really saw this collaboration as a Marketing gig and didn’t brag about this sponsorship.

And there’s the loop back to the slogan. There’s not much of an obvious connection between a charity event with tickets from € 80.- and a hostel. Maybe apart from hostellers hardly ever missing out on a good party.
However, we are indeed united in diversity. Diversity is vital for an open society and it’s in the nature of a hostel. Without tolerance and people who embrace diversity, hostel life would just not be possible.
In a hostel you share pretty much everything with travellers from all around the world. No matter what their cultural background is, whom they love or what their lifestyle is. It’s unfiltered, random and beautiful.

Celebrate diversity

We were lucky enough to share Vienna, our home town with an event like Life Ball. Nevertheless at wombat’s we celebrate diversity and tolerance wherever we can. There’s always a crowd of staff members, ex-staff members and friends of wombat’s who celebrate pride parades, like Regenbogenparade in Vienna, Christopher Street Day in Berlin, the pride in London and other wombat’s destinations.
A good bunch of our staff gets unbelievably excited about these events. It’s more than a LGBT+ thing. It’s about celebrating the freedom to be who you are and love who you love.

For us at wombat’s tolerance and diversity are just natural. That’s why we usually don’t make a lot of fuzz about mentioning it. But maybe we should actually stress our point of view more often?

https://youtu.be/nZE1LyV-9ww

LIFE BALL 2019

Interview with CHRIS (Head of Innovations & Project Management)
Beautiful slogan for the very last LIFE BALL, it has been a “Beacon of Hope”, an instrument for help during the last 27 years.  It´s been so great to be a part of it. I´ve been working during 10 years, wombat´s has been a partner for 6 years. We gladly cooperated with the LIFE BALL this last years to help a beautiful cause.

The essence of LIFE BALL is THE FIGHT AGAINST AIDS, promoting diversity and tolerance, for people from all over the world, with no exceptions, from all beliefs, all sexualities. It´s been a pleasure and a big honour working with them on that cause.

UNITED IN DIVERSITY

That phrase brings everything back to the beginning, when LIFE BALL started bringing together people that were affected directly by the terrible illness of AIDS and brought them together with people who didn´t know, had no information, were not part of the gay community, did not have friends infected by AIDS and just spread the word about this awful disease, by now, AIDS is world ´known, we are on the best on defeating it, but it is very important we keep up this work, spreading information around the world. The disease is still not curable, just treatable.
I´m very proud that wombat´s CITY HOSTELS is a company where I feel very comfortable at, a place that promotes this year´s motto of the LIFE BALL, United in Diversity, on daily basis, because if you look at our staff or our guests, you really see diversity as a mainframe of the company.

Diversity; at wombat´s isn´t something you just talk about. It is something that we live, not something special, it´s what we do!