Scottish Hostel Closures in the News
The projected closure of seven SYHA hostels has attracted some attention in the media. As well as several letters written to The Herald and a report on the BBC News website, the story was featured at length on Radio Scotland’s Scotland Live programme yesterday.
For the next six days you can “listen again” to the whole programme, the report begins about 24 minutes in and includes an interview with Keith Legge, Chief Executive of SYHA, a report from Killin about the feared effect of the hostel closing there, and a talk with Marilyn Barrack of the Elenydd Trust about how they saved T’yn Cornel and Dolgoch and whether the same apporach might work in Scotland. The whole report lasts 20 minutes and besides the odd gag about “bobble hats” gives the whole issue a fair going over.
Viewed from south of the border, the whole situation seems sadly familiar. In many a YHA common room you’ll hear Scotland described as the promised land, where the wily old SYHA have resisted the temptation to excessively “do up” their hostels and kept the sacred flame of simple hostelling alive. Well, now it seems that the Scots are meeting the same problems as the rest of us, coming up with some of the same solutions, resulting in the same response from the membership. We can only wait to see what happens next.
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I’m surprised the SYHA network closures have not created more media interest, especially when less than 12 months ago they opened a flagship £10 million hostel in Edinburgh. It seems only now are we seeing the true cost. Edinburgh must be self financing therefore it cannot make the contribution to the rest of the network that the previous 2 edinburgh hostels made.
One very simple question which puzzles me, why does the SYHA (a well established charity of over 75 years) not have a full time fundraiser to help obtain fund to support these less viable hostels? Thats to me is gross mismanagement or incompetence of the highest order
Comment by charlie babbage — 4 Oct 2007 @ 1:35 pm
There’s an article about the closures in today’s Herald too.
Comment by Chris Hunt — 4 Oct 2007 @ 9:37 pm
Another impact of the Hostel Network review which has so far received no publicity (perhaps because the hostel managers are banned from speaking about this) is on long serving Hostel Managers. Apart from the seven hostels closing, with families being left jobless and homeless, many of the remaining hostels are becoming ‘non-residential’. This means managers are losing the accommodation that has traditionally come with job. This will fundamentally change the ethos of the hostels and mean the manager being part of the community (over a number of years) is lost. Instead you will see a steady turnover in short term hostel managers who will fail to become part of community in the same way. A former Hostel manager also tells me SYHA have Introduced a cluster management scheme in order to save on costs. This is a far reaching and fundamental change, in effect the Manager of Oban YH is also Manager of Tobermory and Loch Lomond. This seems highly impractical based on the distances involved and again demonstrates a move away from traditional community based hostels.
Comment by charlie babbage — 15 Oct 2007 @ 2:38 pm
I’ve just read a report in the herald on-line that up to 23 SYHA hostel managers have been given redundancy notices as part of the hostel review process. changing them for residential hostels to summer non residential posts, is this true, does anyone know about this?
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/letters/display.var.1723536.0.0.php
Comment by charlie babbage — 16 Nov 2007 @ 12:41 pm