Craft jewellery, gift and whiskey shops fill Kirkwall's high street in Orkney. There's even a new sushi shop in town offering bento boxes and matcha cheesecake.
Kirkwall, once home to the Viking earls who ruled the islands, has become rich: it tops the UK charts for cruise ship visitation, and American, German and Italian tourists visit remarkable Neolithic sites such as Skara Brae and its medieval cathedral.
But many Orcadians are fed up: hosting some 450,000 visitors a year, 20 times the local population of 22,000, comes at a significant cost. Its narrow roads are congested, public buses are overcrowded, and the Neolithic stones of Brodgar are now fenced off to restore the site, which had been destroyed by visitors. Some tourists who were unable to find a toilet were even accused of defecating in the open.
Struggling to afford the cost of building new toilets, bus parks and pathways to properly serve visitors, the council and its business leaders want the power to impose a new levy on every tourist landing in Orkney by boat or air.
Orkney Islands Council has joined with the Shetland Islands and Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council) to call on the Scottish Government to introduce legislation for a point of entry charge added to the rates charged by cruise operators, ferry companies and island airline Loganair.
Martin Fleet, managing director of local family-run jewelery firm Sheila Fleet and chairman of business group Destination Orkney, estimates that a flat fee of £5 per visitor could generate around £2 million a year once administration costs are deducted.
“Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, which have small populations, have incredible places that people want to visit, but we need to make sure we protect these assets for the future generations who live here, and for those who want to visit them,” he said.
“We don't want people to stop coming here. We just need to be very careful about how it's managed.”
The Scottish Government has confirmed it is considering an entry charge as part of a wider consultation on introducing a levy specifically for cruise ships, which thriving cruise port councils could use for new tourism infrastructure and local services.
Council leaders have been vocal that the tourism levy is needed to plug a £647 million shortfall in government funding and help them cope with millions of tourists. Scotland attracts every year. The results of the consultation are due to be published shortly.
Scotland has already passed the UK's first law allowing councils to introduce a 'bed tax' – a levy on visitors to hotels, bed and breakfasts and campsites. The Treaty of Edinburgh came into forceas tourists now pay a surcharge of 5% for all rooms booked from July 24, 2026, up to a maximum of five nights.
Aberdeen and Glasgow followed suit, but other councils in the Highlands and Islands rejected the option, often due to a backlash from businesses, insisting that the bed charge was too onerous and was putting customers off.
Shetland rejects visitor levy; Orkney and the Western Isles have “suspended” it, hoping for a better solution such as collection at points of entry.
Industry body Cruise Scotland protested that a tax on cruise ships would deter many of the 1.2 million passengers who arrive each year, “with serious consequences for Scotland's cruise sector, its fragile coastal economy and the country's reputation as a globally competitive tourist destination.”
Orkney Islands Council says the entry charge applies equally to every visitor. It covers 214,000 cruise ship visitors landing there in 2024 and 173,000 arriving by ferry and plane, including caravan drivers, holidaymakers and hotel guests, and those on private yachts.
The Council and Historic Scotland, the agency that looks after Orkney's Neolithic World Heritage Site, are deep into an exhaustive project to build a new visitor centre, bus depots, access paths and toilets to control numbers at the Ring of Brodgar and Skara Brae.
Funded in part by the island expansion agreement between the UK and Scottish governments, which could take up to eight years to complete, building the planned heritage site is a painstaking process.
Christy Hartley, the council's sustainable tourism group manager, said the Scottish Government needed to set out its position quickly to avoid “irritating” the cruise sector, but she said the levy would benefit all parties.
“There's usually no connection between cruise lines and the communities they sell—they sell two things: their ship experiences and our destinations,” she said.
While they have very strong relationships with bus companies and port authorities, “what about the communities that we have a responsibility to protect and serve? This is a huge opportunity for us to really develop those relationships for mutual benefit.”
“If we invest in infrastructure, they can improve the experience for their patrons, they can charge more, they can be confident in what they're getting. It's no secret that in our fragile community there are problems with shortages of toilets and other things that are difficult to deal with at this scale.”
Christopher Leask, councilor and chair of Orkney's Development and Infrastructure Committee, said tourists were becoming increasingly environmentally conscious and socially aware. “There's an open door here: to have a good system, to have good relationships, and for this collection to actually become quite meaningful,” he said.
