gastejo

A clean decode: gasto plus -ej-. The suffix names the place where something happens, so lernejo is a school, preĝejo a church, and gastejo a guest-place: an inn, a guesthouse, a hostel, the small family-run thing with six rooms and a dog.

How it differs from a hotel. Hotelo is the borrowed international word and carries the same commercial weight it does in English: a front desk, a chain, a star rating. Gastejo is smaller, plainer and often cheaper, and it is the word Esperantists reach for when they mean a hostel or a bed in someone's spare room. Neither is wrong for the other, but if you say gastejo to an Esperanto speaker they will picture somewhere modest.

The word every travelling Esperantist knows. The movement runs Pasporta Servo, a list of speakers who put up other speakers for free, and it is one of the genuinely useful things a small language can do that a big one cannot. It is not a gastejo in the commercial sense, but the vocabulary around it is this word's family: your host is gastiganto, to stay somewhere as a guest is gasti, and the person who takes you in is being gastama. More on the living, spoken side of the language in spoken Esperanto.