My stay in Edinburgh started off on the wrong foot. 10 minutes before arriving to Sam’s place, he informed me that he’ll be charging me a $38 late check-in fee. We communicated multiple times ahead of time about my flight’s evening arrival and it was never brought up in our previous conversations. On top of that, when we arrived, there was a notice stating that the front door of the building wasn’t working properly. Initially, I didn’t think anything of it...until I was locked out of the apartment building at 10:30pm. I proceeded to call the number given for emergencies and while trying to be helpful, it was essentially useless as the solution to their problem was 1) look for another key in a random lockbox location and 2) call a random neighbor to open the door. Someone eventually ended up opening it up for us and informed us that the front door doesn’t unlock properly (so the key solution wouldn’t have worked) AND the person who opened the door said that drug abusers were sleeping in the stairwell. Nice.
The place is beautiful and pretty spacious, but the lack of security and lack of transparency ruined this stay. I would not return to Sam’s place in a future visit.