Cruise control: could a £5 ‘entry’ fee help balance Orkney’s needs with tourist demand? | Scotland

The high street of Kirkwall in Orkney is full of handmade jewellery, souvenir and whiskey shops. There’s even a new sushi shop in town offering bento boxes and matcha cheesecake.

Once home to the Viking counts who ruled the islands, Kirkwall made it rich: American, German and Italian tourists flock to remarkable neolithic sites such as Skara Brae and its medieval cathedral, while it remains high on the UK’s cruise ship visit lists.

But many Orcadians have had enough: There is a significant cost to hosting nearly 450,000 visitors a year, 20 times the local population of 22,000. Its narrow roads are clogged, public buses are overrun, the neolithic stones at Brodgar are now fenced to repair erosion caused by visitors. It is stated that some tourists who cannot find a toilet are even accused of defecating in the open.

The council and business leaders, who are struggling to meet the costs of building new toilets, bus parks and roads to cater for visitors, want the power to impose a new tax on every tourist who lands on Orkney by boat or air.

The Orkney Isles council has joined Shetland and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles council) in urging the Scottish government to legislate for a point-of-entry tax added to fees charged by cruise operators, ferry companies and the island’s airline Loganair.

Martin Fleet, managing director of local family jewelery firm Sheila Fleet and chairman of the Destination Orkney business group, calculates that a flat-rate fee of £5 for each visitor could raise around £2 million a year after deducting administration costs.

“With their small populations, Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles have incredible places that people want to come and see, but we need to make sure we preserve these assets for future generations for those who live here and want to visit,” he said.

“We don’t want people to stop visiting here. We just need to be very careful about how this place is managed.”

The Scottish government has confirmed it is considering a point of entry tax as part of a wider consultation on introducing a tax specifically for cruise ships, which councils with thriving cruise ports could use for new tourism infrastructure and local services.

Council leaders have vociferously argued that tourist taxes are needed to replace a £647 million shortfall in government funding and help them cope with the millions of tourists Scotland attracts each year. The results of the talks will be available soon.

Scotland already has the first UK law allowing councils to impose a “bed tax” – a visitor tax – on hotels, hostels and campsites. Edinburgh’s comes into force and tourists pay a 5% surcharge for all rooms booked from 24 July 2026, limited to five nights.

Aberdeen and Glasgow are also following suit, but other councils in the Highlands and islands have rejected the option, often after a backlash from businesses, insisting that a tax on beds is too burdensome and also off-putting for customers.

Shetland rejects visitor tax; Orkney and the Western Isles have “paused” this in the hope of a better solution such as a point of entry tax.

Cruise Scotland, an industry body, protested that the cruise ship tax would delay many of the 1.2 million passengers arriving each year and that it would have “serious consequences for Scotland’s cruise industry, fragile coastal economies and the country’s reputation as a globally competitive tourist destination”.

Orkney council argues a point-of-entry tax would treat every visitor equally. This includes 214,000 cruise visitors landing here in 2024 and 173,000 people arriving by ferry and air, including caravan drivers, campers, hotel guests and those on private yachts.

The council and Historic Environment Scotland, which protects Orkney’s neolithic world heritage site, are immersed in an extensive project to build a new visitor centre, bus parks, access roads and toilets to manage numbers at the Ring of Brodgar and Skara Brae.

Partly funded by a deal for growth on the island by the UK and Scottish governments, the deal could take up to eight years to materialise: building on a planned historic monument is a laborious process.

Christie Hartley, the council’s sustainable tourism team manager, said the Scottish government needed to put forward its thoughts soon to prevent the cruise industry from getting “angry”, but said the tax would benefit all parties.

“Generally speaking, there is often no connection between cruise lines and the communities they sell to; they sell two things: their ships’ experience and our venues,” he said.

While they have very strong relationships with bus companies and port authorities, “What about the communities that we have a duty to protect and serve? This is a huge opportunity for us to really develop those relationships in a mutually beneficial way.”

“If we invest in infrastructure, they can improve the experience for visitors, they can charge more, they can have the security of knowing what they’re getting. It’s no secret that we have issues in our fragile community with lack of restrooms and volume being difficult to deal with.”

Kristopher Leask, councilor and chairman of Orkney’s development and infrastructure committee, said tourists were becoming increasingly environmentally conscious and socially conscious. “There’s an open door there: to have a good system, to have a good relationship, and for that tax to actually become meaningful,” he said.