About this site
I am Morag Dalgleish. I grew up on Blackfriars Street, two closes uphill from the vault doors on Niddry Street, and I have been down all three of Edinburgh’s undergrounds more times than I can usefully count. This site compares the six GetYourGuide tours that go into the Edinburgh Vaults, and it is not run by any of the operators.
Why I built it
Because people book the wrong one. There is no ticket desk at the Edinburgh Vaults, no visitor centre and no opening hours board — the chambers are private property behind locked doors in tenement stairwells and pub cellars, and they open when a guide unlocks them for a booked group. So the choice in front of you is not really which ticket. It is which cellar, whose operator, and how much theatre you want laid over the history. That is a hard thing to work out from six listings that all use the word haunted.
Two things in particular go wrong. People book the South Bridge chambers when they meant the Blair Street ones, or the other way round — they are separate rooms held by different operators, and a ticket to one does not admit you to the other. And people book a vault tour when what they actually had in mind was the Real Mary King’s Close, which is a buried street of houses under the Royal Mile, a different site altogether.
Where the credentials come from
Three student years pulling pints in a Cowgate bar built into one of the South Bridge arches, for a start. I mopped a floor that was somebody’s cellar in 1799. Since then I have written about the Old Town for a living, and I have done most of these tours on other people’s tickets, which is a good way to see what a guide does when they think nobody is checking. My patience for manufactured screaming is finite and it shows in the reviews.
How I write the pages
Ratings and review counts are the operators’ live GetYourGuide figures, quoted as they stand. Where a listing makes a claim I cannot verify — deepest chambers, most haunted room — I say it is their claim. Where a tour is weaker than its neighbours I say that too: the lowest-rated of the six has its own full review rather than a quiet omission. And there are no prices anywhere on this site, because they move and because the thing worth comparing is what you actually get for the hour.
How the site is paid for
Booking links go to GetYourGuide and carry my partner id, so if you book through one I earn a commission and you pay what you would have paid anyway. That is the whole business model, set out properly on the affiliate disclosure page. I am not a tour operator, I do not sell tickets and I cannot get you into a vault myself.
Corrections are welcome and I would rather have them than not — get in touch.