'The Traitors' Contestants Don't Sleep in the Castle: Host Alan Cumming Reveals Where They Actually Stay

The bulk of the action in the Peacock competition series The Traitors takes place in Scotland’s Ardross Castle, but the contestants don’t actually sleep there.

In the show, contestants work together on a series of exhilarating missions to build a prize fund worth up to $250,000. Hidden amongst the Faithful are the Traitors, whose goal is to eliminate the Faithful and claim the prize for themselves. Under the cover of darkness, the Traitors murder the Faithful one by one in a treacherous spree, while the Faithful try to uncover the Traitors and banish them from the game. If the Faithful contestants banish all the Traitors, they will share the prize fund, but if a Traitor (or Traitors) makes it to the end, they will steal all the money.

Every night ends with the Traitors gathering in a secret room to murder a Faithful after everyone has gone to sleep. In the morning, everyone gathers in the breakfast room to discover who got murdered the night before.

So, where are the contestants actually sleeping?

Keep reading to find out more…

A hotel next to the airport!

“Spoiler alert: None of us stayed in the castle. None of us. They all stayed in the airport hotel in the Inverness airport [laughs],” host Alan Cumming said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “How glamorous—you come to Scotland, and you stay in the Inverness airport hotel. And I stayed in a little house in Inverness. But I had a room in the castle where I would get made up and dressed. It had a huge bed in it. So I did actually sleep quite often, but not overnight.”

Former contestant Wilfred Webster revealed that contestants are blindfolded while being transported to and from the hotel to keep the mystery.

“People are blindfolded until they get to wherever they are staying. And you don’t have your phone. We weren’t even allowed the TV remote, so that we couldn’t access the internet or Google each other,” Wilfred told Huffington Post.

Executive producer Mike Cotton said it’s like a “military operation” to transport the contestants and keep the mystery of the Traitors alive.

“The biggest thing is that the show relies entirely on the secrecy of the Traitors, and by that, I mean we have to be really careful that the Faithful don’t know who the Traitors are,” he told Variety. “It’s a massive military operation each night to get the Faithful to bed in individual rooms and get the Traitors back out to have their meeting. And as soon as we start talking about the details of how they sleep and where they sleep, it would unravel any potential future seasons.”

Check out a recap of all the spoilers so far for the current third season.