Businessman Andy Gets Green Light to Run Irvine Golf and Whiskey Tours – Irvine Times

Andrew Tremble, son of former Carters Society captain Andy, secured a private hire license at a recent meeting of North Ayrshire Council’s licensing committee.

Now the 24-year-old hotel and guest house owner hopes to help establish Irvine as a major tourist destination.

It is expanding on the back of the Council’s Great Harbor project which includes the Maritime Mile investment delivered through the Ayrshire Growth Agreement.

Suggestions include:

• The expansion of the Scottish Maritime Museum to include exhibition space and event space
• Development of a site to offer commercial retail and restaurant/food options within an event and arts center
• The development of a significant play facility

The Ayrshire Growth Deal investment will encourage further commercial investment opportunities in the residential and commercial leisure sectors on council land allocated for development under the adopted Local Development Plan (LDP).

Andrew believes the US market is strong, especially with many across the pond flocking to Ayrshire accommodation for the Royal Troon Open.

The Grand Harbor offers (Image: NAC) He said: “We run three guest houses – Marina View, St Andrews guest house and Harborside Hotel. We made many courtesy trips to and from Royal Troon for The Open for our guests in Irvine.

“In the future, we need to make money, so the ultimate goal is to organize trips that you pay for, but we will have convenient transportation and good prices.”

“We have some fantastic courses here like St Andrews and Turnberry as well as Royal Troon so we can arrange trips to them. I see a lot of potential in the city and with the Great Harbor project it will only get better.”

Andy continued: “We hope to run golf tours and whiskey tours to Arran, Glasgow and Loch Lomond. We saw a spike in American and European tourism this summer with the Open. We aim to increase this every year and bring more tourism here.

“Accommodation prices across Ayrshire shot up during the Open week and so we saw a lot of people staying in our accommodation as it was cheaper.

“Every day we drove guests to the golf course, starting at 6am and finishing as late as 10pm.

“From June to September we had 15,000-16,000 guests, so for next year we want to see how many of them are golfers and how many would like to do whiskey tours to Arran or Loch Lomond. We want to use this as a base to take golfers or other tourists.”

Andy concluded: “The council is making a big investment in the port so I think it’s up to businesses to support them as much as we can.”