Practicalities
Where to stay
The key thing to remember is to book early, because people snap up accommodation very quickly. Hotels tend to jack up their prices quite substantially during the Festival period, so you might want to put careful consideration into how much you're prepared to pay. The later you leave booking accommodation, the further from the city centre you're probably going to have to stay – however, Edinburgh is a very compact city with a very good public transport system so staying somewhere 5-8 miles away from the centre doesn't have to be any great hardship.
- The Edinburgh Fringe guide to accommodation — some useful information, especially since private owners can advertise their accommodation for rent on the message boards. These people know what they're talking about: they do live in Edinburgh, after all.
- The Edinburgh and Lothians Tourist Board — the website has an accommodation search facility, but it doesn't tell you if there are vacancies available in any particular place.
- Festival Beds — a very useful service, which can find bed-and-breakfast accommodation with private families to suit just about any pocket. You put your requirements into a form on the website and before long you receive an email telling you what's available to suit. Two members of Theatrical Theatrics Productions found accommodation through this service in 2003 when everything else seemed either to have been booked or prohibitively expensive.
Guidebooks
Amazon.co.uk's page for Edinburgh travel guides.
