Plus Florence

Plus Florence is a five-storey purpose-built hostel on Via Santa Caterina d'Alessandria in the San Marco district, 10 minutes on foot from Santa Maria Novella station and 15 minutes from the Duomo. It's the Italian outpost of the Plus chain (Berlin, Prague) and the biggest hostel in Florence by bed count — around 600 beds across dorms and private rooms.

The building is built around amenities the Via Faenza cluster can't match at this price: an outdoor swimming pool (open May-September) in a landscaped garden courtyard, an indoor pool and Turkish steam bath (open year-round) in the basement spa area, a proper fitness room with cardio machines, and a rooftop terrace with Duomo-dome views over the San Marco rooftops. There's a downstairs restaurant-bar with a 10-15 EUR dinner menu and a nightly events calendar that reliably fills the courtyard in summer.

Rooms run across two wings — the classic Plus side (dorms, 6 and 8-bed, en-suite) and the 'Plus Girls' women-only wing (smaller dorms, en-suite, private common area). Every bed has a flat-screen TV at the foot of the bunk, lockers, reading lights. Privacy is the weak link — the dorms trade quiet for facilities, and the walls to the fitness area carry noise in the 07:00 morning hour.

The 8.5 rating across 20,000+ reviews is the ceiling a 600-bed hostel can realistically hit: it's a hotel-hostel hybrid, not a boutique experience. The reviewers who love Plus love it because of the pools, the fitness room, and the events. The reviewers who rate it lower point to long check-in queues in summer, common-area crowding on pool-party nights, and the on-site breakfast that's closer to a budget-hotel buffet than a curated hostel spread.