Brae Hotel decides to call halt to birthday bus visits

The Brae Hotel has become the latest pub in the north of Shetland to call an end to birthday bus visits.

This follows the decision from the St Magnus Bay Hotel in Hillswick to also ban birthday buses after damage was caused to their men’s toilets on Saturday 13th July.

The Brae Hotel’s general manager Bob Coles said that their decision had been a “long time coming”, but that there had not been damage on the scale seen at the St Magnus Bay earlier this month.

“This is purely a business decision,” he said.

This weekend had seen a “minor incident” outside their pub on Saturday night, he added, with “30 odd people” in the car park playing music from a boombox and drinking their own drink.

He “had people phoning to say about the noise” and the police had arrived at the hotel to see if there was a problem, Mr Coles said.

While he said that this was “not a firm decision” to stop birthday buses coming to the hotel, Mr Coles said he had decided that “the money doesn’t warrant” the hassle, “for the short term”.

With the Delting and Cunningsburgh Parish Cup football teams set to meet at the pub after their match this coming weekend, Coles said they had decided they “can’t afford the amount of drunken people” that would come in from a birthday bus at the same time.

Full article in this Friday’s edition of The Shetland Times.