Columba House Hotel & Garden Restaurant

It’s a cheap place to sleep for a night if you’re passing through, as I was on my motorbike, but I wouldn’t bring a partner here. The dining rooms have been cleared out and the gardens are overgrown, though the big old house is interesting. It’s an old Victorian-style hotel that was taken over a few years ago and now runs as an unattended hostel, which explains the very different photos and reviews. A cleaner seems to call in sometimes, and someone leaves a basic breakfast of cereal, toast and coffee.

The only good thing we took away was the location. The ‘garden view’ we were meant to have didn’t exist, and the beds were uncomfortable. Dust covered the bathroom, with a thick layer and hair along the skirting boards in both the bathroom and bedroom. There was hair and debris beside the toilet, and splash marks on the shower boards, which looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. I didn’t dare inspect the mattress. We were glad to be staying just one night. Getting into the room was far from the ‘simple’ check-in described. No key box code had arrived, and nobody answered the phone at the ‘help desk’. We eventually got access through online chat, but it took 30 minutes from arrival. I can see that it’s cheap and didn’t expect The Ritz, but there are basic standards to meet and this place didn’t meet them. I requested a refund through Booking.com as the property advised, but they didn’t respond. I don’t understand how it can call itself a hotel; it’s a hostel at best. If you want somewhere clean and well kept, don’t stay here.

We booked 3 nights because the property looked beautiful and historic, just outside charming Kingussie, with stunning Cairngorms views. The listing turned out to be misleading in several ways, including its claim that the property was dog-friendly. At 7:00 p.m. we arrived to find our room still occupied by the previous guest’s mess: trash and used linens everywhere, an unmade bed, and poop left unflushed in the toilet. When I called the off-site staff, they didn’t believe me at first and demanded photos. I sent them over WhatsApp while on the phone. We were put in a much lower-quality ground-floor room for the night, looking over the gravel parking lot instead of the countryside, and were told they’d let us know the next day when our booked room was ready. No one messaged to say it was ready. Instead, we were told to pack and leave the temporary room so it could be cleaned, before our original room was ready. After complying and waiting longer, we finally moved into the room we’d booked at about 12:30 p.m. on the second day. We never saw another guest use the temporary room. Later, we were handed its key again and told to return it to the Keycafe, as if handling the property’s operations was our job. There was no on-site management, and the lack of basic professionalism was obvious. Communication became uncomfortable after we moved. From the messages we received, it seemed off-site staff were monitoring guests through Ring cameras in the common areas. We’d told the property two days ahead that we were bringing our dog to this advertised “dog-friendly” place, but management then made arbitrary rules about which rooms could have dogs and demanded a pet fee plus another cleaning fee of £60. These restrictions weren’t in the listing, and booking sites didn’t identify any rooms as unsuitable for dogs. If we’d known, we wouldn’t have booked. Dog owners should also know the only pet-waste bin is in the guest rooms. Between the state of the room, misleading listing, poor communication, intrusive monitoring and unprofessional off-site management, it wasn’t worth the price or risk. We left a day early and handed the situation over to our travel insurance & booking site. I strongly recommend staying elsewhere.

My partner and I were meant to stay for 3 nights, but we didn’t even make it 3 hours. The room was filthy, the bed was broken, and there was actual poo on the floor. Staff seemed reachable only through WhatsApp and expected us to clean it up ourselves. I don’t think you could pay me to go back. See the attached photos for the full review of Columba house, which was too long for Google’s character limit.