Host & Stay - The Old Smokey

Location, parking space, comfortable beds, roll top bath, good shower,.spacious,.clean.

Nothing

Great location, tucked away in a communal courtyard, with safe parking facilities. A short walk to all the local shops, restaurants and bars. A healthy walk or very short drive to the beautiful sandy beaches, which are perfect for walking your dog.

The mattress in the main bedroom was a little soft for our own preference but not so much as to affect our overall comfort. Instructions on how to use the induction hob would have been useful. Got there in the end but a simple guide would have saved us a good 10 minutes.

The location and private parking

The hot water switch should be labelled to tell you what setting it should be on Also the switch on the landing should be labelled You should be aware that you can’t run a bath and someone have a shower at the same time

Good location, a short 5 minute walk to the harbour and town Clean - could not find any fault with cleanliness Comfortable beds ***Not enough room in “what didn’t you like” form so here are the rest of those comments (read lower comments before these) 6. Bedroom storage was minimal. Limited to a few hooks in the twin room and a single storage rack in the double. 7. Parking is extremely tight for an SUV. 8. When leaving the property we had the same issue with the key safe, ie it would not open. As we had to get home we had to leave the property unlocked. 9. Every time we contacted the agency by phone, it seemed they had very little knowledge of the property. We would be met with “We’ll have to contact the owner and get back to you”. 10. When contacting the agency by message, we would initially have to get past a standard AI answering process, which would just cough up standard boiler plate text from the cottage FAQ, and rarely answer the particular question we were posing. While this may save time for the agency, it is frustrating for the customer. 11. The issuing of an “app” for the property is little more than a gimmick, and hopeless if you’re in an area with poor phone coverage. There is endless information on WHAT you should be doing rather than HOW you should be doing it. Some proper information actually left in the property relating to correct usage of appliances would have been infinitely more useful to the customer.

1. Before setting off to Seahouses, we found the information on parking ambiguous - especially when looking at Google Street View. We asked the agency for clarification. We never received an answer. 2. A £15 surcharge to arrive at 3pm instead of 4pm seems cheese paring and mean. We have never come across this before. 3. Upon arrival the key safe was jammed, and we were unable to open it with the supplied code. We were keen to get in as our youngest needed the loo. We rang the agency who asked for our booking code - buried somewhere within the emails on my phone. Surely the agency has a database of bookings which can also be searched on customer name, property name etc ? Eventually I managed to coax open the key safe after about 30 minutes without any meaningful help received from the agency. 4. Once inside the property it was cold and all electric heaters were off. No instructions anywhere on heater operation, so another call to the agency. We were told that all heating would start automatically and we shouldn’t need to touch the radiator controls. (This contradicted the instructions on the property “app” which told us we had to reduce the radiator temperature to 15° every time we left the property - neither did it address the fact that we were cold NOW). After much trial and error we eventually found a way to manually set the heaters - we should not have to spend our holiday time doing this. Just a few basic instructions would have solved the issue. 5. Similarly there were no instructions for the dishwasher or the electric hob. There was no way to open the french doors (pictured attractively wide open on the cottage advert and app). We eventually figured out the dishwasher, but the hob remained a mystery (so a planned meal was aborted and we had to eat out) and the french doors remained locked firmly shut. To be fair we did receive a message telling us where we could find a key for the doors - unfortunately this message arrived several hours after we checked out