Welcoming a Scotland Hostel

Hi Argus, I'm glad to see another YHA hostel has been saved, combined with disgust how the YHAs have treated their loyal supporters by SELLING their hostels to them! (I'm a member of the Elenydd Trust which saved 2 hostels in Wales). I've travelled past your hostel a number of times when it was SYHA. The Elenydd hostels are in the YHA Enterprise scheme, which they find fairly necessary to keep getting bookings and to have a booking service, although the YHA take substantial commission for providing the service. I take it you are going alone, but you do have a convenient main road location, so good luck!

I'll be interested to hear how convenient you find Backpack Online, maybe I'll drop by in the next few months.

Hi Argus, I'm glad to see another YHA hostel has been saved, combined with disgust how the YHAs have treated their loyal supporters by SELLING their hostels to them! (I'm a member of the Elenydd Trust which saved 2 hostels in Wales). I've travelled past your hostel a number of times when it was SYHA. The Elenydd hostels are in the YHA Enterprise scheme, which they find fairly necessary to keep getting bookings and to have a booking service, although the YHA take substantial commission for providing the service. I take it you are going alone, but you do have a convenient main road location, so good luck!

I'll be interested to hear how convenient you find Backpack Online, maybe I'll drop by in the next few months.

Yes, there were 7 hostels sold by the SYHA recently, I'm not sure how many will be opening up as independent hostels, but I know that wome will. Lots of the hostels sold in the last 10 years have opened again under new ownership.

Which does make you wonder why the SYHA can't make a go of them financially but private owners (who often have motgages that the SYHA never had) can't. I'd suspect that the days of a large beaurocratic organisation running low marging businesses like hostels are passing. I'm not sure what the admin costs of the SYHA are, but they are substantial. It's just too hard to have these costs and try and compete against owner operators.

The only future I see for them is running a few large scale city tourist hostels, catering largely to bus tours etc.

We are going alone, don't have any affiliate status with the SYHA. We'll see how things turn out - obviously there's the external booking engines. The new owner has invested a lot in renovations etc. so things are definitely looking up compared to our days working for the SYHA.

I've found backpack online fine so far, my only other experience was using the SYHA's system (CRS) and I like this better already. I should say though that we don't have employees - it's just the two of us here, so no need to train anyone else.

Thanks for the message, and feel free to visit anytime. We'll be open all year now (excl. January)