VisitScotland Reviews 5

Incapable of answering this simple question: Is it easy to find diesel in gas stations in Scotland?!

Annoying website. No maps of the routes it a guessing game where any of the road trips are. Scotland is so boring, and full pot holes anyway. Avoid this website just totally put you off. Useless and missing information needs shutting down.

I stayed three nights at Oir na Mara B&B on Eriskay. The hosts Mary and Eachann were friendly and welcoming. The accommodation was spotlessly clean and fresh and breakfast was first rate. Would heartily recommend.
Moran taing

We stayed in this lovely cottage in a reasonably quiet area ,it has everything you could need for your stay, extremely clean and welcoming! Has easy access for disabled and is pet friendly too. Lots of lovely walks and breath taking views all around you , the train station is in the town if you wish to go on a journey further north etc, will definitely recommend to all our friends, thank you

Visit Scotland is the outreach of the Scottish government's Tourist Board and is omnipresent on the internet flogging Scotland as a holiday destination. Over the past decade they have popularised the North Coast 500, a route circumnavigating Scotland from Inverness, round to John O'Groats across to Cape Wrath and down to Ullapool etc. 500 miles of breathtaking scenery, but for whom?

Apart from Oil Scotland's main income is Whisky and Tourism so you would think that the Scottish executive would have the situation sorted but my wife and I recently got back from a two week break doing the North Coast 500 route and were disappointed to find the people unfriendly, the services almost non-existent and overcharging everywhere (£1.54 per litre for diesel at one fuel station near Ullapool.)

We became campervan fanatics in our twenties and have had top-class vans like the iconic VW ever since. We've travelled all over the world in our campers and are members of both the UK's camping clubs. Apart from visiting all areas of the UK we just love to travel on the continent and earlier this year completed a 4,000 mile round trip via France, Switzerland and down into the south of Spain.

Many campervanners love France because the country is beautiful and the authorities WELCOME people in motorcaravans by organising places for them to park in almost all village centres where they can stay overnight. The parking is usually absolutely free and they also put in a Service Point where campervanners can empty their porta-potti, drain their grey water tanks and take on board fresh water at a 2 or 3 euro charge.

The French aren't daft, they know that when the average campervanner parks up here they will inevitably patronise local shops, certainly for bread and croissants for breakfast and very often the local bar for a meal in the evening. Before leaving they will visit the local butcher and grocer to replenish their food lockers. On their way out of the town they will usually spend another 40.00 or so filling up with fuel.

After millions of miles of campervan travelling I estimate that wherever we stop we spend on average about 40.00 per day. With parking bays for say ten campervans that brings in about euro 3,000 extra income per week to sleepy villages that need it.

The French were the first to introduce 'Aires' twenty years back and the system worked so well that the Germans and the Italians built their own network of Aires (Stelplatz) to attract motorcaravanners, many of whom are retired with disposable income. After all, the average cost of a motorcaravan/campervan is over £50,000 , quite an investment, and many well-off retirees are choosing this way of touring.

In Scotland however these people are treated as pariahs, as kind of cheapo gypsies who are apparently despised by the local people and the authorities. They prefer coach-loads of Chinese tourists because the people who control Visit Scotland are obviously ignorant or prejudiced against the kind of money campervanners bring to Scotland.

Touring facilities in Scotland are almost non-existent. Campsites are infrequent and of very poor quality. The Caravanning and Camping Club and the Caravan Club sites are of the highest standard but there's only a dozen or so of them in the whole of Scotland. These clubs run a certified 5 van site system which enables any landowner to provide a kind of 'Aire' with basic services and bypass the planning regs. Obviously Highland land-owners aren't interested because there's a dirth of them in Scotland.

You cannot find any public toilets anywhere in the countryside. In fact I believe they actually had a campaign to CLOSE public toilets a year or so ago.

There is absolutely no provision for the emptying of grey or black campervan waste anywhere in Scotland. Nowhere. Then they complain when one or two unscrupulous motorcaravanners en extremis commit the cardinal sin of dumping black waste. Of course it is wrong, and I ensure you it is rare, no one I know has ever done it, but when you are travelling the North Coast 500 near Cape Wrath and cannot find a campsite because the Scottish Executive can't be bothered to subsidise one in the area, what is one to do? What we did was double the usual daily mileage and high-tail it to Ullapool to the next campsite with emptying points. I can see French mayors guffawing at the lack of insight and inventiveness here.

Now this isn't just a problem for the thousands of campervan owners who visit Scotland. We noted on our travels that there has been an explosion of RENTED motorcaravans , we spotted dozens of vans from at least nine companies, Indeed VisitScotland itself advertises and takes a cut on bookings for motorcaravan rentals. They encourage more motorcaravans and show wonderful photographs of high-end campervans parked up on white sandy beaches, yet refuse to put services in to cope!

We noticed that many of these motorcaravan renters were from outside the U.K. This industry is one of the few that is actually growing in Scotland, yet motorcaravanners are prejudiced against throughout Scotland, no provisions to park, no toilets, no dumping points, insufficient campsites in key places, and they then complain when we are forced to park-up in laybys. Goodness knows what French, Italian and German motorcaravan renters, who are aware of how well their own countries welcome campervans, think. Like us they probably won't bother doing it again.

But it is not just campervans and motorhomes which are made unwelcome. Since our last trip to Scotland over a decade ago we have found that the people themselves are unwelcoming. Let me add that we only found this unwelcomeness in the North West/Highlands. The lowlanders and border Scots were very pleasant and helpful in comparison, yet once one gets above Inverness things change. It kind of coincides with the use of gaelic on road-signs and signposts so I must conclude that the North West Highlanders are more nationalist and isolationist.

For instance, we arrived in Gairloch on a Sunday. Everything, and I mean everything, was closed. Pubs, Cafes, the lot. We searched around and found only one cafe open for lunch, it was absolutely packed and thriving because there was no one else in Gairloch offering meals or coffee on a Sunday in the busiest part of the holiday season. The reason soon became clear. The owner was English. Locals just don't care.

Even during the week the service in cafes etc is indifferent. The locals treated us as outsiders. Often spoke gaelic instead of English by choice in our company. We had to wait 25 minutes in one cafe just to get a bacon sandwich, whilst the waitress fiddled with her nails. Whatever money the Scottish Executive spends on Tourism it isn't going to training cafe owners and waitresses in being efficient and pleasant.

In one instance, we took some groceries including a box of half a dozen eggs to the checkout in a small store in one village and I noticed a stain on the egg box. When I opened it one of the eggs had been broken. I said I would get another, she told me I would have to pay for the broken egg. I told her I hadn't broken it and in any event her breakage insurance would cover it. She insisted I pay. So we walked out and left all the groceries, purchasing them in another village further along our route.

Let me add, again, that this strangely only applied to Highland Scots, the lowland Scots and Border people went out of their way to be friendly. It obviously has something to do with the current political situation. There is undoubtedly anti-English sentiment in the North West of Scotland.

My last complaint about our trip is that the roads there are appalling. We've driven the length and breadth of Spain, which has similar geological extremes, and their road system is fully maintained and a pleasure to use. The pot holes and poor road surfaces caused by big lorries and coaches thrashing down designated A roads which wouldn't pass for B roads in any other place is just jarring and dangerous. These are main trunk roads for goodness sake; there just doesn't seem to have been any infrastructure investment in the North West for decades.

Annoyingly in the cases where several roads were in process of renewal the Scottish Executive cheekily puts up large blue signs telling users that it is being paid for by the EU and the SE. This is a lie of course, because all EU projects in the UK are matched 50-50 for funding by the British central government. It is this kind of snide atmosphere which made our trip an unhappy one.

Even though the scenery is absolutely stunning we will not be going back to the Highlands again until these problems have been fixed, instead we will concentrate on the border counties and France, Germany, Spain and Italy, They feel more like our friends and don't make us feel like gypsies. Their scenery is equal to or greater than that in Scotland. They give good service and deserve our money.

BTW a recent Forbes report estimated that caravanners and campervanners bring in £9.3 BILLION in visitor spending in the UK.

Of course the people at VisitScotland and the Scottish Nationalists obviously haven't a clue about this and instead prefer to complain that the reason why some out of the way places are in the economic doldrums is because of the English and if they got control of their own economy their futures would be brighter. (sigh).

John