After 3 weeks in the UK, we booked this room through an Information Desk in Edinburgh for one night. When we got there, the man answered the door with not even so much as a "hello". All he did was yell at us without physically raising his voice, that we were 2 hours late and it was a holiday weekend. My husband and I had no idea that there was a required check in time as we had not experienced one prior to this evening at any other B & B and, we were not really sure what he meant by a Holiday weekend since if it being a holiday was a problem he should not have been open for business looking for guests to stay with him . After he rushed us up to our room which wreaked of MOTH BALLS, he showed us the shower and tried to explain about a power switch that needed to be turned on and talked to us about it like we were just dumb American Tourist. We had not seen one of those showers yet on our trip either ,so I felt the questions we asked were normal ones. There are signs all over every item in the room of "don't do this" and "do this", it felt uncomfortable the entire time as if we were walking on egg shells before we even got there. In the morning my Husband heard the host yelling at another guest for not eating something that he had requested, and how much money it cost which was totally inappropriate. It left a bad taste in my mouth for B & B's after that. If the host is that particular and so easily annoyed with his guests, he should stop running a business that is supposed to cater to them.

We found the St. Elmo B & B to be charming, quiet, accommodating and generally pleasant. The owners were helpful getting us onto the city bus system, to various tourist locations, had a wonderful breakfast and made us feel welcome overall. On our first evening there were directed to a very nice restaurant (albeit quite expensive, but then what in Scotland is cheap?) and helped us to get our laundry taken care of. The room itself was small but very adequate and we found the owners to be pleasant, the guests engaging and could not complain of a thing! We hope to go back to this nice establishment.

After touring through England and Scotland for 2 weeks we finished our trip up at aberdeen where we were due to fly out of the next morning. St Elmo’s was advertised as a 4* b&b, and was a fairly reasonable rate for this quality accom, around 60 pound. However after booking this at the information centre we drove straight to the b&b, we were greeted by a short grumpy man who told us we were not expected for another half an hour, and that we should hurry up and get our bags up stairs, it felt like he was my school principle from years ealrlier, after putting our bags in the room, which wasn’t too bad a room, not a 4* room, but comfortable and clean, he proceeded to set the ground rules in a dictative tone, following this we asked for recommendations to eat for the night in Aberdeen, his only response, was “there’s a pizza place on the corner”. The next morning we inadvertently parked in the wrong spot, and when heading down for breakfast we were greeted by the short man who attempted to give us the lecture of all lectures. Really put a dampener on our views of b&b’s, until we got to Dublin where our faith was restored.
A tip for the owner of the “St Elmo”, to own/run a b&b you need to be able to engage in civil conversation and be pleasant and open with your guests, they are paying you for a service, you aren’t doing them a favor. Would highly recommend giving this place a miss.