mcm151201 wrote:You may want to check out the Master Lock Speed Dial. It's going to be lighter than the S&G posted above, which is nice for traveling, and has a perfectly adequate protection against the types of attacks you mentioned. Having just traveling this summer through many hostels, I would say the following based on what I saw:
- You won't want to carry a key, go with a combo lock.
- You may find yourself not needing a padlock much of the time, as hostels will either have already-keyed locks on the lockers or will provide padlocks.
- The lockers themselves will be incredibly flimsy, the lock isn't going to be what stops someone from getting into it.
- Stuff gets stolen at hostels ALL the time. After being in a few I ended up not leaving any of my valuable stuff in them. I occasionally left things with staff, but generally I would only leave clothing at the hostel if at all possible. If you really have something valuable you need to lock up, like a camera, consider going to a ritzy hotel and trying to check it at the front desk ("I just checked out but my flight doesn't leave till tonight, can you lock this in your house safe for me?").
Hope that helps! Where are you traveling to?
This is good information - I'm headed out for a mostly eastern europe tour ( krakow, budapest, prague, berlin ), and plan on doing mostly hostels to keep my costs down. I'll have a new DSLR camera + lens with me, so that's about $800 worth of equipment I'm going to be worrying about.
I traveled through those areas, 15 countries and all. I wasn't in Krakow however. I'll tell you though... don't stress about the padlock. In all of those 15 countries I stayed in hostels, and in not a single one did I use the padlock I brought. In fact only two had lockers where I could have attached my own padlock, and both of those provided a padlock to me. 
