Sixty degrees north puts Shetland level with the southern tip of Greenland, and on June 21 the sun sets around ten twenty at night and is up again before half past three. Between those two times it does not get properly dark. That single fact does more to shape a week here than the weather does, because it means a day that starts badly at nine in the morning can still be salvaged at eight in the evening, and people who book seven nights end up using eleven or twelve usable daylight blocks rather than seven.
The reason to book a trip to shetland most of a year ahead is not the airline. Seats to Sumburgh open the same eleven months out that seats anywhere open, and there are usually some in April for July. It is the houses. There are perhaps two hundred self catering properties across the whole archipelago that meet the standard we will put a client into, most of them owned by one family, most of them let by the same handful of returning parties who confirm their week before they leave. What reaches the open market in a given autumn is what those parties released.
The other cap is physical. The evening ferry to Lerwick from Aberdeen carries a fixed number of cabins, and the aircraft that flies the Sumburgh leg is small. Neither of them can add capacity in July.
- Notice
- Eight to twelve months, one or two pieces go first
- How far ahead
- Eight to twelve months, counted back from your arrival date, not from the month you start thinking about it.
- What has to be reserved first
- The single component that goes first is the four to six person self catering house within reach of the Sumburgh road or the Yell and Unst ferry chain, and it goes because the same families take the same weeks every year. Most owners open the following summer's diary between the second week of September and the middle of October, some by a single email to last year's guests before anything is public. The strong part of that release lasts about three weeks; by late October the third week of June and the first week of July are usually gone across the whole of the south Mainland. Come in March and what is left is late May, late August, or a house forty minutes further from the airfield with two bedrooms instead of three. The fallback we use most is shifting you to the last week of May, when daylight is already past eighteen hours and the cliff colonies are full, or splitting the week between two smaller houses on different islands with the ferry crossing in between.
- Nights
- 7
- From
- $3,180 per person
- Shape of it
- boat or plane, then a house and a car
- What is in the figure
- Seven nights of self catering house with linen and a stocked kitchen; return airfare from a US gateway to Aberdeen or Glasgow with the onward Shetland leg; a small car for the full seven days with unlimited miles; the inter island ferry fares for two crossing days; a written arrival plan with the cottage owner's instructions and the ferry timetable for your dates; one written itinerary revision after booking.
- What is not
- Food, fuel and any meal out; boat trips to Noss or Mousa and any seat booked with a boat operator; landing fees or seat charges on the small aircraft to Fair Isle or Foula; ferry vehicle bookings beyond the two crossing days named above; wildlife guides, archaeological site guides and any admission charged at a site; baggage charges on the domestic leg, which sit under the transatlantic allowance and catch people out; anything you add after the written itinerary revision; taxis, parking and the fuel surcharge on the airport car; travel protection of any kind, which we do not sell.
- Who it does not suit
- Anyone who cannot fix a departure date eight months ahead, or who wants to decide the week later. Anyone hoping for warmth: July daytime highs sit near 57F and the wind is constant. Anyone who wants a full week without driving, because the bus network does not reach most of the houses we book and the ferry timetables assume a car.
Ground, wind, and roads that end at the water
Nothing grows above knee height. The wind comes off the Atlantic with nothing to slow it, and the ground is peat, heather and cropped grass all the way to the cliff edge. This matters practically: sight lines are long, weather is visible forty minutes before it arrives, and there is nowhere to shelter on most walks except the car.
The Mainland runs about seventy miles end to end, and the A970 does most of that work. Driving from Sumburgh at the southern tip to Toft for the Yell ferry takes a little over an hour and a half without stopping. North of that, everything is ferries: Yell, then Unst, with roll on roll off crossings of twenty and ten minutes running through the day. Hermaness on Unst, the northernmost walk in Britain, is about a four mile round on boardwalk and peat with roughly 500 feet of ascent, and puts you above the gannet cliffs at Muckle Flugga.
Mousa is a separate case. The island sits offshore from Sandwick and is reached only by a small boat that runs a limited season. The broch there stands more than forty feet, the tallest surviving structure of its kind, and you can climb an internal stair to the wallhead. Seat numbers on that boat are limited by the boat, which is why we treat it as a separate reservation and not as part of the week.
The autumn diary, and what goes in which month
Cottage owners here are not running yield systems. They are running a calendar on a kitchen wall, and it opens when they get around to it after the season ends. That informality is exactly what makes the timing sharp: there is no gradual price curve, just a diary that is empty in September and largely full by November for the four best weeks.
Our own working rule is that a client who wants the last two weeks of June should be talking to us in September or October, and a client who is flexible about the week can safely wait until the New Year.
- September
- owners open the following summer, often to returning guests first
- Late October
- the third week of June and first week of July are gone across the south Mainland
- January
- Unst and Yell houses with three or more bedrooms are largely committed
- March
- what remains is late May, late August, or a smaller house further north
- May
- Mousa boat dates for the peak weeks are full; day sailings to Noss still open
From your first message to the confirmed week
We work backward from the house, not from the flights. Once a specific property and a specific week are held, everything else can be arranged around it, including which of the two Scottish gateways you route through. picked up inside the working day. a written number follows inside two to four working days, because we are waiting on an owner to answer an email, and owners here answer in the evening.
- First messageyou give a month, a party size, and whether ferries north are wanted
- Shortlistthree or four houses with their release status, distances in miles, and what each one is near
- Holdthe owner holds the week while we price the air legs and the car against your dates
- Confirmationwritten itinerary with arrival instructions, ferry times for your dates, and the full figure
Tell us the month and we will tell you what is still open
If you have a summer in mind and no fixed week, say so in your first line. That single piece of flexibility is worth more here than any other thing you can bring us, and it is usually the difference between the house you wanted and the house that was left.