YHA: Investing in the Future?
Hostel Trends and News
I have seen an article from YHA (England & Wales) celebrating their 80th anniversary, called: Investing in the Future.
Even by not spending sufficient money on the day to day maintenance of hostels we have relied on the sale of hostels to generate cash and to meet our obligations to the banks for our existing borrowing.
In my words:
"We have been gradually destroying our only asset, just to keep going."
We’ve been selling hostels and borrowing for the last thirty years
Over the last year we’ve been considering very carefully the investment which is needed in Youth Hostels to ensure the long term success of YHA.
YHA will need to become financially sustainable.
it is clear that the size of the existing network YHA owns and manages will need to be significantly reduced in size to achieve sustainability. Currently our financial model shows a likely end position of around 100 hostels.
When I joined YHA around 1960 it had 270 hostels.
If they make it financially sustainable but have lost their reason for existence, is that success?
I like this:
We will be examining all the costs of the business so we can create a financial model which no longer needs the sale of properties to sustain it.
I believe that this article is not published. If you wish to see the article, please send me a personal message with your email address, and I will email it to you as an attachment.
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14 years
Quote:
We will be examining all the costs of the business so we can create a financial model which no longer needs the sale of properties to sustain it.
Translated as "We need to keep selling hostels to support the administrative costs of the organisation." The vast majority of their hostels would be sustainable in their own right, but as they have to pay in effect a huge subsidy to keep the bureaucracy running they aren't viable. This can be seen by the number of sold hostels that end up a private hostels and do fine.
14 years
Translated as "We need to keep selling hostels to support the administrative costs of the organisation."
Since they are a charity, are their financial numbers online? That might be interesting to look at.
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