Airbnb

Everyone that does at least a little bit of travelling, has surely come across multiple booking sites, either regarding accommodation, flights or anything else like that. Before our trip to Scotland earlier this year, whenever I looked for a place to stay, I always checked hotels and/or hostels first, but as you know, hotels can get quite pricey. After visiting Scotland, where we only stayed at apartments found on the Airbnb site, now that’s my first choice when looking for accommodation if I’m travelling somewhere, as I have already mentioned in a previous post, when I wrote about the trip to Scotland. And I apologize in advance to anyone who might read some things twice because of that, I will try to mix things up a little though.

If you read the post I am referring to (here), you will see that I already wrote some things on the subject, although I do have some more experiences with booking an apartment on the site now. For the Scotland trip, I wasn’t the one making the bookings, so that part was still a bit of a mystery to me, if I may say so. Since then, that has also changed, and I know how that works too. I know I might have made it sound like it is something very challenging, but as for any other thing, you never know until you try. 🙂 And I can tell you that it’s not a big deal at all, not complicated even one bit.

So, in general, my experience with Airbnb apartments in Scotland has been great, apart from some minor problems let’s call them. Our first apartment, and the one we spent the most time in, was in Edinburgh. It had one master bedroom with a private bathroom, another smaller bedroom, a kitchen/dining room, a living room with a nice TV and another bathroom on it’s own.

As you can see, everything was really tidy when we came in, it was pretty late in the evening, past our supposed check-in time, but the owner understood we couldn’t help it, because our flight was scheduled to arrive so late. As you might think, no one came to clean up every day as they would at a hotel, so we had to do that ourselves. We also brought some food with us, but nevertheless, we still had to buy some things as we were going around the country. I could say that that has it’s own pros and cons, because you do get to eat exactly what you want (well, in our case, there was a lot of pasta :D), but on the other hand, that also takes up your time preparing it and then cleaning up afterwards. Nevertheless, I still think that, even though you do spend some more money on food, it’s still cheaper than staying at a hotel and still buying some food throughout the day.

Next up on our trip, was Inverness. We didn’t have a place all to ourselves, because the owners are renting out different floors of their house, where they actually stay with the guests. I mean, they have their own space, so the guests don’t bother them, even if they stay up a little longer, assuming that they aren’t too loud. It was a different experience than in Edinburgh, for sure, but it turned out really great, too bad we were only there for one night. I am most certainly going to visit them again some time soon.

After Inverness, we moved to Uig on Isle of Skye, where we also spent just one night. To me, that apartment was the best one of all, even though all of them have been great. We only had a bit of a problem with the TV, it turned off by itself every 3 or 4 minutes, so in the end, we turned it off completely and watched some shows on a computer. 😀 The apartment was quite big, with a dining room, one smaller bedroom, a living room and a kitchen all downstairs, and two big bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. The views from the rooms facing west, were especially stunning, at the time, I didn’t know yet what we’re going to see on the other side of the island.

From Uig, our path led us to Oban, another over night stop. We spent most of our time in Oban outside, and left it pretty early the next morning, so I fell in bed as soon as I had the chance and went to sleep. Otherwise, it was a lovely top floor apartment, not as big as the previous one, but for the four of us it was spacious enough.

And our last stop, or so we thought, was Glasgow. Remember me mentioning some problems earlier? Well, most of them, if not all, were with the apartment in Glasgow. First, the unresponsiveness of the owners, getting the keys to the apartment and so on. The apartment itself didn’t look that bad at first sight, as you can see below, but it’s problems started to show in the evening.

I was alone in there a few hours, and noticed quite a lot of things I didn’t like. One of the windows overlooking the street wasn’t closed all the way, and you can imagine what it’s like if you leave a window open in February. Probably won’t be that warm inside. 😀 Later we did manage to fix that, but another thing, which we couldn’t really do much about were the lights. As you can see on the living room photograph, there is a light above the table, but it wasn’t even strong enough to light up the table, let alone the whole room.

To finish off my Airbnb story (if I may call it that :D), I would say that no matter where I’m going to go in the future, if I won’t go alone of course, I will always try to find an apartment on this site and then look elsewhere, if I really can’t find anything good. I booked an apartment in Germany for my family, so we will see what they think of it, when they come back. 🙂