Travel advice for Brazil
From travel safety to visa requirements, discover the best tips for traveling to Brazil
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Accommodation in Brazil covers the full range, from hostels and basic lodgings clustered around bus stations to luxury resort hotels. You can sometimes find places to sleep for as little as R$20 a night, but, more realistically, a clean double room in a basic option will set you back upwards of R$30–45. A good, comfortable hotel varies according to the city – Rio being considerably more expensive – but R$100–150 a night will get you better accommodation than you’d expect for that price in Europe or the US. As is so often the case, single travellers get a bad deal, usually paying almost as much as the cost of a double room. In whatever category of place you stay, in tourist spots – both large and small – over New Year and Carnaval you’ll be expected to book a room for a minimum of four or five days.
Hotels offer a range of different rooms, with significant price differences: a quarto is a room without a bathroom, an apartamento is a room with a shower (Brazilians don’t use baths); an apartamento de luxo is normally just an apartamento with a fridge full of (marked-up) drinks; a casal is a double room; and a solteiro a single. In a starred hotel, an apartamento upwards would come with telephone, air conditioning (ar condicionado) and cable TV; a ventilador is a fan. Even cheaper hotels now have wi-fi (sem fio) in the lobby at least, and three-star hotels upwards have wi-fi and/or cable (cabo) in rooms as standard, although you will often have to pay a surcharge.
Rates for rooms vary tremendously between different parts of Brazil, but start at around R$25 in a one-star hotel, around R$60 in a two-star hotel, and around R$80 in a three-star place. Generally speaking, for R$60–80 a night you could expect to stay in a reasonable mid-range hotel, with bathroom and air conditioning. Many hotels in this bracket are excellent value for the standard of accommodation they offer – but expect to pay more in major cities such as Rio and São Paulo. During the off season, most hotels in tourist areas offer hefty discounts, usually around 25–35 percent.
Most hotels – although not all – will add a ten percent service charge to your bill, the taxa de serviço: those that don’t will have a sign at the desk saying Nós não cobramos taxa de serviço, and it’s very bad form to leave the hotel without tipping the receptionist. The price will usually include a breakfast buffet with fruit, cheese, ham, bread, cakes and coffee but no other meals, although there will often be a restaurant on-site. Hotels usually have a safe deposit box, a caixa, which is worth asking about when you check in; they are free for you to use and, although they’re not invulnerable, anything left in a caixa is safer than on your person or unguarded in your room. Many hotels also offer a safe deposit box in your room, which is the safest option of all.
Finally, a motel, as you’ll gather from the various names and decor, is strictly for couples. This is not to say that it’s not possible to stay in one if you can’t find anything else – since they’re used by locals, they’re rarely too expensive – but you should be aware that most of the other rooms will be rented by the hour.
You will also come across the pousada, which can just be another name for a pensão, but can also be a small hotel, running up to luxury class but usually less expensive than a hotel proper. In some small towns – such as Ouro Preto and Paraty – pousadas form the bulk of mid- and upper-level accommodation options. In the Amazon and Mato Grosso in particular, pousadas tend to be purpose-built fazenda lodges geared towards the growing ecotourist markets.
You could stay for not much more, in far better conditions, in a youth hostel, an albergue de juventude, also sometimes called a casa de estudante, where the cost per person is between R$20 and R$35 a night. There’s an extensive network of these hostels, with at least one in every state capital, and they are very well maintained, often in restored buildings. It helps to have an IYHF card (available from your national youth hostel associations) with a recent photograph – you’re not usually asked for one, but every so often you’ll find an albergue that refuses entry unless it’s produced. The Federação Brasileira dos Albergues de Juventude in Rio publishes an excellent illustrated guide to Brazil’s official hostels – and there’s a growing number of hostels that aren’t affiliated with the IYHF, many of which are very good.
Demand for places far outstrips supply at certain times of year – July, and December to Carnaval – but if you travel with a hammock you can often hook it up in a corridor or patio. A major advantage that hostels have is to throw you together with young Brazilians, the main users of the network.
From travel safety to visa requirements, discover the best tips for traveling to Brazil
written by Rough Guides Editors
updated 26.04.2021
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