Stay Edinburgh City Apartments．Four Nights on the Royal Mile, a Full Kitchen, and Four Flights of Stairs

Stay Edinburgh City Apartments is a serviced apartment company in Edinburgh’s Old Town, less than a five minute walk from the Royal Mile, renting flats with proper kitchens, bathtubs and washing machines. I stayed four nights in a four bed apartment with two friends in mid June, for roughly £100 (about US$130) a night for the whole place. The location and the space were the best part. The fourth floor with no lift was the part I was not ready for. This post covers what the flat actually looked like against the booking photos, the Old Town slope nobody photographs, whether you can really cook in it, the dryer that did not work, and how they held our bags while we went up to the Highlands.

Will the apartment look like the booking photos? Here is what actually happened

“Is it a luck of the draw situation?” That question comes up in almost every English review of this place, and it is a fair one. The honest answer: the flat I got was not the flat in the listing photos, and I was still very happy with it.

Stay Edinburgh City Apartments does not run a single building. When you book, the site shows you a size, a bed count, and photos of an apartment matching that size and bed count. What arrives in your inbox a few days before check in is a separate email with the real address and a photo guide to where the keys are left. So the listing is a category, not a specific flat.

I will not pretend that is ideal. If you need to know exactly which windows you are getting, book somewhere that sells you one named unit. But when I walked in, I had already forgotten what the listing photos looked like, because there was nothing I wanted to complain about.

What is Stay Edinburgh City Apartments, exactly?

Stay Edinburgh City Apartments is a self catering apartment operator in Edinburgh Old Town, with its office at 217 High Street directly on the Royal Mile, renting fully equipped flats with kitchens, bathtubs and washing machines rather than hotel rooms. It sits closer to a short let than to a hotel: no restaurant, no 24 hour desk, no daily housekeeping.

That trade sounds worse on paper than it feels in practice. The office staff answered the phone, sent someone out, and let us walk in when we had a problem. Twice, as it turned out.

Why I ended up here instead of the hotel I wanted

Because the hotel I wanted was already gone. I had planned to book the Knight Residence by Mansley, on a friend’s recommendation, so I would be walking into somewhere already vetted. I started looking in March for a stay in mid June and it was sold out. In March. (👉🏻 Check rates for the Knight Residence by Mansley)

That is the first practical thing to take from this post, and it has nothing to do with any one property. Edinburgh in June is already inside the shoulder of high season, and by the time the Fringe crowd starts booking in spring, the good self catering flats in the Old Town are the first things to disappear. If your dates are anywhere near summer, treat three or four months ahead as normal, not cautious.

So I went with Stay Edinburgh City Apartments as the backup, with slightly lowered expectations, which is probably the fairest position to review anything from.

Arriving four hours early, and the keys that were not in the mailbox

We turned up more than four hours before check in, which was entirely our own doing. The cleaners were still in the flat, so the keys were not in the mailbox where the email said they would be.

I called the office in a mild panic. They sent someone over quickly and let us in. For a company with no front desk, that response time is what made me trust them for the rest of the stay.

Four flights, no lift, and the Old Town slope nobody photographs

The building has no lift and my flat was on the fourth floor. An office staff member carried one of our bags up, which I did not ask for and did not expect. Older buildings in Britain mostly do not have lifts, so this is the norm rather than a scandal, but you should know it before you pack.

The bigger issue is the ground itself. Edinburgh’s Old Town runs from the Palace of Holyroodhouse up to Edinburgh Castle, and that whole stretch sits on a slope, a steep one. You may think you are fit enough. The real question is whether you are fit enough while dragging a large suitcase up it, over cobblestones that chew through suitcase wheels.

The upside of that same slope is that you are standing in the middle of everything. From 217 High Street, St Giles’ Cathedral is a couple of minutes further up the same street, Edinburgh Castle sits at the top of it (roughly a ten minute walk, all of it uphill), and the Palace of Holyroodhouse is at the bottom of the other end. You are not catching transport to see the city. You are walking out of the front door into it.

And if you would rather not do the climb with luggage or tired legs, there is a well known local workaround: take a bus along Princes Street and get off at South Bridge, which drops you onto the Royal Mile near the top and turns the hike into a short flat walk. Worth knowing on the day you arrive.

Old Town or New Town: what you are really choosing is your legs.

	Old Town	New Town
Terrain	Continuous slope, steep in places	Comparatively flat
Surface	Cobblestones, hard on suitcase wheels	Ordinary pavement
Walk to sights	Castle, St Giles’ and Holyroodhouse all on foot	A longer walk or a short bus
Buildings	Older stock, often no lift	More modern hotels with lifts
Price	Higher	Not actually cheaper
Best for	Light packers who want to live inside the history	Anyone with heavy bags or bad knees

My verdict: the Old Town is worth it, as long as your suitcase can get up there.

The layout, the beds, and what four nights actually cost

Roomier than we booked for, is the short answer. We booked for three people, but the flat type already came with a bunk bed, so it is really a four bed apartment and three of us had room to spread out.

	This stay
Dates	Mid June
Apartment type	Four bed, including one bunk
Guests	3
Floor	4th, no lift
Rate	About £100 (US$130) per night for the whole apartment
In the flat	Kitchen, bathtub, washing machine, living room, dining area, main bedroom
Daily housekeeping	None

Rates move with the season, so treat that number as a reference and check the booking sites. For context, splitting one apartment three ways in the Old Town, five minutes from the Royal Mile, with a full kitchen, is good value rather than cheap. That is the category I would put it in.

The bathroom is small but complete, and it has a bathtub, which after a day of walking uphill is not a small thing. Past the bathroom and the small bedroom you reach the living room, dining area, kitchen and main bedroom. The living room is compact and still fits three sofas with seating for four.

Can you actually cook in it?

Yes, and it is the best part of the flat. The kitchen is small but it has an oven, an induction hob and a microwave, and they supply the cutlery, plates and pans, so nothing is missing and nothing is decorative.

People ask me whether apartment kitchens are just for show. In this one they are not, and the difference is cleanliness. I have stayed in places where the supplied plates were filthy and scratched to death from being scrubbed wrong, and I did not dare eat off them. Here the crockery and cutlery were genuinely clean. That is the whole test.

Now the part the listing will not tell you. The washer dryer would only wash. Whether I was using it wrong or it was simply broken, the spin and the dry cycles did nothing, so we hung everything on the drying rack they provide. Edinburgh’s climate did the rest and the clothes were more or less dry by the next morning.

What a kitchen actually changes on a trip is not the money, or not only the money. It is that you stop eating out three times a day in a city where every meal is a decision. We did a supermarket run on the first evening, kept breakfast in the flat, and came home some nights to cook instead of hunting for a table at nine o’clock. On a four night stay in a busy Old Town, that is the difference between a holiday and a schedule.

One more thing worth planning for: over three or four nights nobody comes in to clean, and all your rubbish stays in the same bin and the same bag for the whole stay. The bin is large so it never filled up, but we were cooking, so by the end there was food waste in it and it did start to smell. If you are staying longer, ask the office at check in whether someone can empty it.

Waking up in the light: the part I remember most

The main bedroom has no door between it and the living room, presumably so the space does not feel boxed in, and the trick works. The bed sits right by a window, and being woken by morning light coming into an Old Town flat is the image I have kept from this trip.

There is a version of Edinburgh that most visitors never get, which is the city before the Royal Mile fills up. Because we were living on it rather than commuting to it, we were out early most mornings, and the street at that hour belongs to delivery vans, a few runners and the light coming down between the tenements. That is the thing a hotel further out cannot sell you.

On the dining table there was a welcome card, a fake plant, and a tourist map of Edinburgh. The map is genuinely useful if you arrive without a plan. The plant is not, and I liked it anyway. Something growing in a room, real or not, changes the whole day.

They held our bags while we went up to the Highlands

Yes, they will store luggage, but you have to arrange it in advance. Not every hotel or guesthouse in Britain offers luggage storage, so confirm before you assume it, because plenty of people find out at the door.

Our Highlands tour had a luggage limit, so we could only take part of our things north. The awkward part was that we were not coming back to one of their apartments afterwards, so I assumed they would say no. They did not. They agreed, and then kept reminding us of their opening hours because they were worried we would not collect the bags in time.

Because the tour’s meeting time clashed with the office hours, we dropped the bags off the day before checkout, went up to the Highlands, came back for them the day after we returned, and walked to the train for London. For a place with no 24 hour desk, that flexibility is worth a lot. Paid storage in Edinburgh starts at around £2 per bag per day, so this saved real money as well as a detour. If you have not picked a tour yet, my guide to choosing a Scottish Highlands tour from Edinburgh is the piece most people need next.

Who should book this apartment, and who should skip it

In one line: it suits people who want to be inside the Old Town and are willing to carry their own bags. Book it if you:

• want to be on the Royal Mile every morning without a commute
• are travelling as three or four and want to split one apartment
• plan to cook, or need to do laundry on a longer trip
• are heading to the Highlands and need somewhere to leave bags
• are staying three nights or more and would rather have a flat than a hotel room

And be honest with yourself about the stairs, because that is the one thing here that no amount of goodwill from the staff can fix. Skip it if you:

• are travelling with heavy luggage and could land on a high floor
• have knees, mobility or vertigo issues on stone staircases
• are staying one night on a tight schedule and will never use the kitchen
• want your room made up and your towels changed daily
• need a 24 hour front desk to feel comfortable

Would I book it again?

Yes, with one condition: I would ask which floor I was getting before I paid. Everything I disliked about this place was structural and everything I liked about it was human. The stairs, the broken dryer and the bin that nobody empties are the building and the business model. The staff coming out to let three tired travellers in four hours early, carrying a bag up four flights, and holding our luggage for days when we were not even coming back to them, that is a choice somebody made.

For three or four people who want to live inside the Old Town for a few days, cook a little, do some laundry and walk out onto the Royal Mile every morning, this is good value rather than cheap, and I would take it over a mid range hotel room further down the hill. Just pack lighter than you think you need to.

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