Cabinas, cabins, hostels, glamping: what the words mean in Costa Rica

What are cabinas in Costa Rica?

Cabinas is the Costa Rican word for simple, cheap lodging: a row of rooms with a private bathroom, usually a fan and a fridge, run by a family who lives on the property. It has nothing to do with a log cabin in the woods.

This is the country’s oldest kind of roof for travellers — the one you find a block back from the beach, hand-painted sign out front, the owner’s car parked in the entrance. People searching for cabinas are after price and location, not timber and views. The ones listed here are under cabinas.

So what is a cabin, then?

A cabin — cabaña in Spanish — is a standalone little house, usually wooden and usually among trees or up in the hills, rented whole. It fits a family, has a porch, and often has a kitchen.

That’s the entire difference and it’s a large one: with cabinas you rent a room in a row of rooms; with a cabin you rent the building and shut the door. Cabins are typically well outside town, up a gravel road; cabinas are typically in town. Costa Rican cabins are listed under cabins.

Why does the difference matter to me?

Because booking sites translate cabinas as “cabins” and hand you the wrong result. You search for a wooden cabin in the forest and get shown a row of budget rooms beside a road — or you search for cheap beachside rooms and get shown a mountain lodge an hour from anywhere.

That’s why this site keeps the two as separate categories and doesn’t translate one into the other: in English, cabinas stays cabinas. It’s how Costa Rican guidebooks have always written it and how anyone who’s travelled here already reads it. If you learn one word before you arrive, make it that one.

What is a hostel here, and who is it actually for?

A hostel sells the bed, not the room: you pay for your bunk in a shared dorm and share a kitchen and bathrooms. What most people miss is that many hostels also keep one or two private rooms, and that private room is often cheaper than a hotel on the same street.

So a hostel isn’t only for twenty-year-olds with backpacks. For a couple watching the budget, a private room in a hostel with a shared kitchen is frequently the smartest deal in town — and the kitchen matters more than it sounds in beach towns where eating out three times a day adds up fast. They’re under hostels.

What do I get with glamping?

A real bed, a bathroom and electricity — but you’re sleeping under canvas or inside a dome. It’s camping with nothing to pitch and nothing to carry.

The point of glamping isn’t the tent, it’s where the tent is. Because the structure is light, it goes where a building couldn’t: facing the sea, inside the forest, looking at a volcano. The trade-off is that you hear everything happening outside, which is the appeal for some people and the reason others don’t repeat it. Ask what happens in heavy rain and how far the bathroom is from the bed. Listings are under glamping.

What about a vacation home or a B&B?

A vacation home is the whole house for a group travelling together: kitchen, living room, several bedrooms, door shut behind you. It’s what you want when there are six or eight of you and booking six hotel rooms makes no sense.

A bed & breakfast is the opposite in scale: a house with a handful of rooms where the owner lives on site and cooks breakfast. You’re sleeping in someone’s home, and that’s the point — what you take away from a B&B is the conversation over breakfast, not the pillow.

And what does “hotel” mean in Costa Rica?

A front desk, numbered rooms and someone on duty, same as anywhere. What differs is scale: most hotels in the country are small and family-owned, even though the sign uses the same word a chain would.

A twelve-room hotel run by the family that built it is a hotel, and it will give you things a chain won’t. The reverse is also true — don’t expect room service at eleven at night. See hotels, or the full index of where to stay.

What about “lodge”, “apartotel” and “villa”?

Lodge means something concrete here: accommodation set well out in the forest or up a mountain, away from town, which is why meals are often included — not as a luxury package, but because there is nowhere else to eat. If you see “lodge”, ask how far the nearest restaurant is before assuming anything.

Apartotel is another Costa Rican word, and it means an apartment with a kitchen rented by the night — useful for longer stays or for travelling with children. Villa, on the other hand, isn’t a category at all: it’s a marketing word applied equally to a rental house and to a hotel room with a pool.

What should I ask before booking?

Five things, whatever kind of roof it is, and all of them are answered by WhatsApp in two minutes.

First, whether the price is per room or per person — both ways of charging exist here. Second, fan or air conditioning: it’s common for the same room to have two prices depending on which, and on the coast that choice decides whether you sleep. Third, hot water and what kind: in simpler places the water is heated in the shower head itself by an electric element, which gives you warm water at low pressure. It works, but it’s better known in advance than discovered at six in the morning.

Fourth, what the last stretch of road is like. A place can be ten kilometres from town and those ten kilometres can be gravel with two river crossings — the real question is whether your rental car makes it. Fifth, whether they take cards: in the smallest village places, cash is still what settles it.

How do I actually choose?

Start from how many of you there are and how many nights, not from the photos. Two people for three nights: the room barely matters and location matters completely — cabinas or a hostel. Six people for a week: the kitchen matters more than the location — vacation home or a cabin.

And if you want the place to be part of the trip rather than somewhere to leave the suitcase, that’s where glamping, a lodge and a B&B come in. Every listing here carries the owner’s WhatsApp so you can ask them directly, and they’re the ones who know whether their place suits what you’re planning to do.