My best friend introduced me to Selina a while back when I was looking for places to stay for my South America trip. The inspiration behind it seemed great for any young traveller with all budgets offering hostel style shared room, hotel-like rooms and even apartments. Perfect for lone traveller looking for a community, the digital nomad needing a place to work and really anyone looking for a friendly community in their place of stay.

We stayed 2 separate times in the Selina Lima and wanted to share our experience and thoughts about this growing brand in South America.

As we were a group of 4 looking for our first stay, we had planned to book the 2 bedroom apartment, but took too long to decide and ended up with 2, 1 bedroom apartments on the same floor. We paid ~$90 / night for each room. Not necessarily the cheapest, but definitely not bad for how much space we had.

We arrived in Lima off a “red-eye” flight from La Paz having not showered properly in 3+ days and was really hoping we could have one of the rooms booked to freshen up. The receptionist was so nice and allowed us to check-in to one of the rooms at 8AM, which I cannot tell you how much we appreciated.

The apartments were located in a separate building that very clearly was still being worked on as the lobby was still a construction zone as you can clearly see in my photos. But I did really love the repurposing of the old cars.

The rooms were really well decorated with a clean minimalistic Nordic inspired design. It seemed most of the decor pieces were locally sourced as all the throw blankets were very similar to the alpaca blankets you could find in all the markets. So thumbs up for helping the local economy.

Windows in pretty much every room made the whole place bright and airy – perfect setting for a little bit of yoga and handstand photos.

The second time we stayed, we opted to try the standard room with a private bathroom, like a typical hotel. This being in the main building made it more convenient to pop down to the reception for any requests.

Unfortunately, I apparently didn’t take any photos of this room except in my daily handstand photo, but to be honest I was a lot more disappointed with this room than our first. The main reason being that the bathroom was very awkward and had the bathtub / shower tucked in a corner behind the bathroom door. Because there was a wall closing off most of the tub, there was absolutely NO light while I shower.

Although I wouldn’t say Selina is top notch quality, the vibe and community definitely make up for it and is great for young travellers. Overall I really enjoyed my experience with Selina and hoping to try out another one of their locations soon.

If you have stayed in a Selina before, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments