Five YHA hostels up for sale in England

If the YHA says that a hostel is 'financially unviable' it means: unviable to pay its share of the YHA management costs. Many former YHA hostels are now appearing in independent hostel listings, being run with enthusiasm by people who don't insist on big salaries, or even by volunteers.

For example, we stayed at YHA Bellingham (Northumberland) a few years ago. It had a good atmosphere, but it did seem to need some repair work. That the YHA closed it was not too surprising. But I have just noticed it alive again in the Independent Hostels Guide.

YHA's idea of "refurbishment work" is probably to get it to a level that the YHA now sets themselves: better than necessary for a backpackers hostel. YHA hostels are now all very well fitted out, but they could operate just as well as backpackers hostels with substantially less costly work.

I would be interested in being involved in keeping some of these hostels running. Pity that one would have to start by paying YHA the market value of the property.

And just remember, some of these hostels were donated to the YHA many years ago, and were looked after for many years by volunteers at a much reduced cost to the YHA!

...being run with enthusiasm by people who don't insist on big salaries, or even by volunteers...

Does anyone know what the salaries at YHA or other HI organizations are? If they are nonprofit organizations or charities, wouldn't that information be publicly available? I'm just curious what the administration costs are like and how they compare to "for-profit" hostels.

At least in the UK most for profit hostels are run by owner operators. These don't have Marketing Directors, CEOs, IT departments, personnel departments , and various layers of off site hostel operations managers. They have the people who own and run the hostel, and whatever staff they need to run the desk and clean the hostel. In some of the larger ones the owner may not work at the hostel, but employ a manager on-site to do this. Obviously you need to have enough profit to meet these costs.

If you compare this to the various HI Associations, they have high levels of administrative overheads - in some cases around 20% or more of total revenue goes out on administrative costs. There are some benefits, such as group marketing and group wide IT systems, but the costs associated with these are enormous. Consequently the only way they can keep the business afloat is to regularly sell off the smaller hostels. Or in this case some larger ones too. I am sure that a lot of the management of the different associations would be happy to have a network of large hostels in cities and prime tourist areas, and sell off all the smaller ones. Then any smaller ones would be affiliates, owned and operated independently, but maybe marketed with the HI ones. This is what has happened in Australia and NZ.

Maybe this is the only way for the future, it just seems sad to those who've known the large network they have had and the ethos of what they stood for. If the only way to survive is have a large administrative structure and a few big city places they are pretty much no more than a budget hotel chain.

The Guardian has published an article about this. The writer has made a good effort to write a balanced report:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/feb/23/youth-hostels-association-selling-off

My own opinion is perfectly expressed by the following 2 contributions to the comments below the article:

I've been a life member of the YHA for about 20 years and I object to the way it has been changed to be more focused around making money, city destinations and car drivers.

The YHA should stick to its founding aims and keep remote hostels open.

I worked in Lakes hostels for several years (up to 2006) and became increasingly disillusioned with the way the organisation was being run centrally. Increasingly, National Office staff had no background (or seemingly, little interest) in the culture of YHA, and instead wasted god knows how much time and money implementing wrong-headed centralisation schemes and bringing in expensive consultants with no understanding of or empathy for youth hostels. The threat of closure or absorption into a larger hostel hung over the head of managers who weren't happy about changes and didn't toe the party line........
Last year YHA received accolades for its excellent local food; at the same time, hostel managers were being told they now had to purchase everything from Brakes, thus massively increasing their carbon footprint and withdrawing support from local businesses. .......
The recently announced closures to me are symptomatic of a deeper malaise within this once-great organisation which has woefully lost its way. I worked at Derwentwater and Hawkshead - they are both very close to my heart and I'll be immensely sad to see them go. But I feel that without some deep systemic changes to the organisation we will see more and more of this, until we are left with a string of soulless, homogenised and overpriced travelodges.

I would add that many of these properties in the past were DONATED or sold cheaply to the YHA, and then restored and maintained with the help of lots of enthusiastic volunteers. I don't believe the YHA has the moral right to try to sell them at full market value, perhaps to (the next generation of) those same volunteers!

I am quite certain the YHA will not listen to the likes of us complaining. They regard us as old-fashioned.

The questions relevant to this forum are: For these hostels to continue to run as hostels, is running by independent groups or companies the only way? Most groups or companies that have the required funds are more likely to turn them into hotels or care homes.

There has indeed been success with two small hostels in mid-Wales: the Elenydd Trust, a group of volunteers, are running these hostels with great success. But those hostels each cost around £130,000, within the scope of volunteer effort. For the Lakes hostels, we are talking of a million pounds or more. Any ideas?