Five YHA hostels up for sale in England

I imagine it's the entire HQ. I would suspect that they were selected for their jobs on the basis of their business acumen and not their enthusiasm for hostelling.

I know a person who is very active in the Elenydd Trust as a volunteer, he has been a manager of numerous YHA hostels and is an enthusiast with similar views to you and me; he described how he went on a YHA internal course and he felt out of place in the environment of people talking about business themes.

I'd like to think they have business acumen, but with a lot of the decisions that have been made I'm not so sure about that. Certainly gradually selling your assets to keep afloat doesn't seem to show a lot of acumen.

Do members have any say? No. Once upon a time (back in the 60s) they probably had a major say. But they have been steadily squeezed down to zero. I can tell you several ways in which this is evident, but think of Animal Farm and you get the idea.

I think members could have a say if they went en-masse to the AGM and voted in a new board. As an individual or a even a pressure group of individuals they haev no say however. In my experience however there are only a limited number of people who want to get really involved, and a lot of people who just complain. This is probably the problem for a lot of these sort of organisations.

Profitable? You will know as much as me if you read the Facebook campaign page and the articles it links to. It seems that Derwentwater (the one being most talked about) IS making a profit.

If Derwentwater can't make a profit then the the YHA is in a seriously bad place. It's a large hostel in the prime rural tourist area in the country with limited competition. They merely drag up figures of over a million needing to be spent on it to justify selling it. This tactic has been used before, but is doubly stupid, as it lowers any potential sale price. It's the only way they can justify it and kill argument against it however.

Incidentally I read on another forum someone who seems to speak for the YHA - though might not, I'm not sure - he/she said that they need £90million, so there will be a lot more sales coming. This is their mindset.

Agree with all that. The problem is that the reasons the YHA give for the sale that they need to invest in other hostels is merely a justification to hide their flawed model. The fact is that they need to sell assets to keep operating their current model going. It will certainly be interesting to see how much of the proceeds of these sales actually goes back to hostels. I don't think all of it has in the past. According to a poster on that YHA group the admin costs of the head office are £8m on a £40m turnover. I don't know if that is reasonable or not, but I do know that independent hostels don't have non hostel-based staff costs at that level. Perhaps that is where the surplus of places such as derwentwater has gone. In the past I would have hoped it goes into small hostels, but they have been offloading those recently.

The slow, agonizing death of a great idea... it´s the same here in Austria. Last year, an huge new HI "hostel" has opened in Vienna. It has only doubles, with a TV in every room.

The slow, agonizing death of a great idea... it´s the same here in Austria. Last year, an huge new HI "hostel" has opened in Vienna. It has only doubles, with a TV in every room.

I just looked it up. The overnight cost for a SINGLE TRAVELLER is €50! That's 3 times the cost in the HI's other hostels in Vienna.