Worst 'tourist' places you've visited

[ThunderOnlyHappens]

A little inspired by the school trips thread but I have been thinking about the worst places I've visited in pursuit of leisure. Disclaimer-sorry if you live there/love it. These are not anything other than my experience on that day/time.

There was the time I took a group of patients for a nice country stroll, which turned out to be a lay-by off an A-Road.

Or going on holiday to a small town near Gainsborough and realising that there was nothing to do, at all. We were there for a week!

RedDwarves, I lived in both Sydney and Perth and travelled a lot in Australia for work over a two year period.
I didn't like any of it. I found it incredibly racist and sexist which probably didn't help.
Things like "We're meeting up wuth the Chinks next week" and "You're a pretty girl love, make the most of yourself" didn't help.

@fussychica we are on the last day of a holiday in Rome and we’ve had a great time. It is hot, it is dirty in places and it’s mental busy day and night but there is loads to do even the dc have enjoyed it. We booked two weeks and stayed just outside the city. We’ve been to the beach, done all the touristy things eaten some fabulous food and drunk some cheap but lovely wine. We’ve spent days hanging out in the sun and drove down to Pompeii and today we are driving up in to the mountains to go to a restaurant with a terrace by a lake. Weather has been amazing.

I do prefer Paris to Rome but can’t say there wasn’t enough to do here and we chose two weeks to give us time to do all we wanted as well as plenty of quiet days. There is an outdoor pool here so we’ve had plenty of use of that as well.

@highby

If you went to the Louvre and headed straight to the Mona Lisa with the masses then more fool you.
There are plenty of areas of the Louvre that are very quiet (and not for a good reason - just because there are too many idiots who only come in to see the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo then leave).
If you must see the major museums/attractions and artworks within them then you have to get up early and turn up for when they first open. There's no other way around it. And we have found that in many cities - not just Paris.

As for the armed police in Paris, I actually found it quite reassuring as a commuter. It meant, to me, that there was a higher chance of an incident being prevented and that if something did kick off then it would be quashed far more quickly if personnel were already at the scene.

I have read many places are trying to reduce numbers and only really want affluent people who will spend a lot of money

That’s quite a contradiction in terms when you think of the people on a cruise ship who could have paid thousands for the pleasure because they are affluent.

Not people who just get off a cruise ship and wander around and spend nothing

Quite a generalization when you consider most people get off a ship and go on tours, visit museums, have meals, drinks, buy things in local shops etc.

As it happens I live in a country where tourism is deliberately based on quality rather than quantity but we do still have cruise ships in a few months of the year and money is spent by the passengers. Both can exist side by side and I think people like myself who cruise would laugh at the notion of no spend days when there can easily be no change out of 500 dollars a day and quite often much more if you chose to do a private tour with your own guide in order to have the best experience possible. I’ve done that a few times and one of the best days of my life was in Florence with a retired university lecturer as my guide.

The radio programme about Rome - the Slow Food Movement in Rome is very much alive and well as are other family run restaurants with ner a pizza in sight.

Aw, sorry thecatneuterer. I didn't mean to spoil your memories.

I'm sure in the 60s and 70s the place was a lot less run-down.

As a kid I had brilliant holidays in Great Yarmouth. Some of my very best memories are centred around the place - but I wouldn't like to go back now, because I'm sure it's not as golden as my memories...

There's nothing weird or funny about comparing NZ scenery with Scotland's scenery. They are comparable.

I agree about New York not being a patch on London. It was like going back in time and I thought it would be the opposite .... don't get me started on JFK airport

You have to ask if tourism is really that beneficial to countries or just the tour companies, in many of the poorer countries the all inclusive resorts mean people spend little or nothing locally just boost the profits of multi nationals.

But at least the multi nationals you hate ARE employing local people (even if just for menial work) and having tourists provides work/money in other areas, such as tourist attractions, shops, cafes, etc (even with all inclusives, most people leave occasionally!). Take The Gambia, just what else would there be for the locals to do and earn money if it wasn't for tourism? Tourism also creates infrastructure which is of benefit for locals not directly involved, such as new roads/motorways, power, sanitation, internet, airports, etc.

Wales has a little known Eden project of its own near Carmarthen (national botanic gardens of wales. It's lovely and a family ticket is the price of normal entry to Eden. I love that sort of thing, but found Eden was not great at the time of year I went. After visiting the one in Wales, I'm not sure how they justify cost. Cafe was nice though and a cute robin posed for pictures..probably not worth almost £60!

I unexpectedly loved Paris, but it did have issues of course.

I think tourism can be done badly - all inclusive resorts where all the profits go to the tour operators, tacky shops that sell awful tat and make the place look cheap; or it can be done well - family run hotels or hotels run by local owners, eating out in local restaurants, buying locally made goods, food and drink etc.

I agree that tourism often improves the local infrastructure of some places - plumbing, electricity, transport etc, but often the locals don't benefit. Many posters who have holidayed in some of the AI resorts in the Caribbean have illustrated the clear demarcation between the rich holiday makers and the poor locals. I would feel very uncomfortable holidaying in places like this.

Almost all tourist-class small English seaside towns are startlingly dull and grubby

No surprise really when they were built to cater for English holiday makers decades ago, and are now run down because people go abroad for holidays instead and seaside towns have been repeatedly ignored when it comes to regeneration & development by successive governments, lottery, EU and even local councils. In fact, councils have often made things worse by encouraging "undesirables" to come and live in the empty guest houses converted into bed sits, of course, bringing their "problems" with them. In fact, some seaside resort town councils actively encouraged newly released prisoners to their resorts to fill empty properties - without giving any thought to the drink, drug, crime and mental health problems that would come with them! Even today, immigrants (legal and illegal) are encouraged to go to the old seaside resorts, again to fill empty properties. It's all well and good, but infrastructure is usually poor, there is usually high unemployment so no jobs, local health providers and schools are struggling with high demand, etc. No surprise that lots of "failing" schools are in old seaside resorts.

DD had to do Blackpool as a study case for GCSE geography, and she (and I) learned that many of the problems there are due to the transient population as well as the other issues mentioned on here.

There are still a lot of lovely seaside towns in the UK, so please don't lump them all in the same category as Blackpool.

North Norfolk coastal towns, Tenby and Alnmouth all spring to mind as lovely places to visit.

The tropical dome at the Eden project is amazing. The other dome isn't so interesting - especially if you have been to the Med and seen these plants in real life. Maybe we'd have been more impressed if it was the first time we'd seen an olive tree. When we went last year there was a random space exhibition on in there as well. Not sure what the connection was but it was surreal to be in pretend Greece/Spain while someone is doing a presentation about space rockets.
We queued up to walk through rooms which supposedly looked like each of the planets. Most of the information about the planets was in the corridors between the rooms so you couldn't really stop and read it because of the queue of people behind you. Some rooms were better than other. One was just a load of polystyrene painted over to look like ice. You could tell this because someone had taken a chunk out of it and it hadn't been repaired. I couldn't see the link between space and the plants.
A lot of the explanation signs at the Eden project are aimed at about 6 year olds - tell you the obvious in very simple language. There is no depth for the adults. And DH and I were irritated by the number of spelling mistakes or other errors on the signs.

Food was good and efficiently served but - inevitably given it was August - the dining room was very noisy. Like many of these places they've designed it in a nice big space so that all the noise carries.

I found the food surprisingly good at the Eden Project as well.

I like the smell of piss in Paris

I spent a month in NZ and travelled all over. Yes the scenery in Scotland is comparable or better. NZ has glaciers and some geological features that Scotland does not have. But Iceland has more impressive geological features and glaciers.

cedar Yes the information in the Eden Project was very poor. If I had paid much less to go in I would have shrugged it off. But it is an expensive day out.

1. Blackpool. We took DD to the lights when she was young.The lights were pretty shit. There were groups of alcoholic homeless-looking men everywhere. There was a stag party wandering around wearing just socks over their cocks. Outside our hotel we had to step over a woman who was unconscious with her trousers round her knees and a needle sticking out her groin. Vile, disgusting place.

1. Copenhagen. Boring. Absolutely fuck all to do. Very very very very expensive.

1. Majorca. Hotel was dirty. Food was shit. Hotel entertainment was shit. I got called a "Nigger" by one of the hotel reception staff when I complained about the noise of the guests next door.

Anyone, absolutely anyone, also found Cape Town over rated??

Spoon, I thought the ciccheti bars were very expensive and, TBH, a lot of the food just looked like fried and breadcrumbed things. I'm sure there are nice ones but I don't think I have a knack for finding them! As for back street/tiny piazza restaurants and bars two corners away, I really did try – didn't look at restaurants anywhere near St Mark's Square etc –but it was still all pretty mediocre.

I think I need to self-cater, or go with someone who really knows the city. Or I wonder if there are any locals who do informal tours...

My husband wants to add the swimming pools of France.
He refuses to wear budgie smugglers, board style shorts are not allowed in quite a lot of french swimming pools.

Nikita, this came up on a random google search I typed in Food tours local venice. It also covers other tours as well.

www.withlocals.com/experience/venetian-family-traditions-private-tour-8bf12b43/

I love Copenhagen! It has great shops (both clothes and house stuff - DH and I spent the best part of a day pottering in them), and fabulous restaurants (we have friends there, so they told us the best places to go). If you like art museums, then the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek is lovely. There are also some great places to visit nearby, all accessible by train, like the Viking Museum in Roskilde, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek and the Karen Blixen Museum in Rungsted. It's not somewhere I would rush to visit with kids though - it's an adult place - and it is expensive.

As for New York - it's a weird mixture IMO. I lived and worked there for six years and got to know it quite well. In many ways it's like a third world city with all the street vendors dragging their little carts around, but then it has these eye-wateringly fancy, expensive bits too, where you see musicians and film stars and people who just look really rich - but then you look down and there is filth all over the place, rats running around, it stinks in the summer, its fucking freezing in winter - tbh I was glad to move back here! I like to visit though.

In many ways it's like a third world city with all the street vendors dragging their little carts around

Most of the US is like that, tbf. The gap between the rich and the poor is bigger than in most of Western Europe and there is more poverty there. Agree that it does feel more similar to many developing countries in that way.

Yes, that's very true Bruegel. We travelled a lot when we lived there and at times drove through neighbourhoods that were bloody terrifying. I'll never forgot visiting Baltimore for a weekend. The bit around the harbour is all tarted up and nice - restaurants, shops, museums - much of the rest of it is a ghetto.

What I don't understand about New York though is that there are SO many gorgeous bits of the US, with MUCH better climates, where it would be so much more pleasant to live. yet all those rich people, who could probably live anywhere, crowd onto one tiny, dirty, alternately boiling/freezing island!

And yes - I agree that many places - including most of the iconic cities of Europe are ruined by mass tourism. You have to go out of season really, when the weather can be a bit crap, in order to move along the streets of places like Florence, Venice and Rome.