Review of Balmore Guest House 3*

My sister and me stayed at the Balmore B&B in a twin room from the 11th to 16th May. At first I impressed. The young 18-year-old Scottish girl who greeted us was very friendly and we felt very welcomed. Though had to drag a very heavy suitcase up three floors. No lift. Our opinion of the place changed dramatically the morning after our first night. Breakfast is served from strictly 7am to 9am and we had to walk across a busy street to the main building to get it. Which to us was strange and awkward. Also you have to order your breakfast by 9pm night before, awkward if your out and about. However this was not what changed our opinion. During the first night we went out in town and arrived back late. We were just in our room when we heard a very loud aggressive banging at our door. A woman then shouted very aggressively “stop the banging it has been going on for 15 minutes”. We were shocked we were only just in. We didn’t answer the door because we didn’t want to deal with someone like that. The next day as soon as we walked into the breakfast room the hostile manager greeted us, requesting for our room number. As soon as we said 26 he launched into us. The big man thought he was a hard guy attacking us, two young women in our early twenties because of a noise complaint. The woman who complained about us was there with her bags. They deliberately were waiting there to ambush us. Must of felt good the two of them, a woman in her 50s and a big man in his 30s shouting at two young girls. We had just gone through bad experiences back home and came to relax and get away from all that. He kept demanding we apologise to the woman. We stood in shock. Even if we had made noise this was beyond over the top. He never gave us a chance to talk. She started shouting, criticising our characters. Stating she was a higher class of person than us. The manager had us standing there for 10 minutes, and I said I would not apologise for something I haven’t done. The woman then walked out, and he said we would have to pay for her stay and to go for breakfast and he’d discuss it more later with us. We sat at the breakfast table feeling shaken and too upset to eat. We were embarrassed in front of all the other quests and hadn’t done anything wrong. We left breakfast haven ate nothing. We went outside and I rang my mother to see what she thought we should do. I felt shaken, scared, and I just wanted to get away from there. The thought of staying here gave me anxiety. We went in to talk to him, me now in tears. He said he had no reason to disbelieve the woman and stood his ground. Adding that the woman said we had opened the door and gave her verbal abuse. My phone rang and it was my mother asking to speak with him. I handed him the phone. She said her problem was not with the other guest but with him and how he talked to us. She said she would take action against him. Then suddenly he wasn’t such a big man and backed down. He then admitted that he talked to the guests in the room next to us, before we came in for breakfast, and they said they heard nothing from us, all they heard was the banging on the door of the woman, who turns out was staying downstairs from us. He also said that he could check CCTV to see if we did open the door and talk to her, and stated there’s two sides to every story. My mother persisted that her problem was with him not with her. It was how he dealt with it and the verbal abuse he gave us. After he got off the phone with her he said there’s two sides to each story and reluctantly said sorry.