Comments on: Scottish Hostel Closures in the News

By: charlie babbage

charlie babbage — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:41:10 +0000

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

By: charlie babbage

charlie babbage — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:38:23 +0000

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.

By: Chris Hunt

Chris Hunt — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 21:37:22 +0000

There's an article about the closures in today's Herald too.

By: charlie babbage

charlie babbage — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 13:35:02 +0000

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