Ask what’s the worst holiday you’ve ever had?

[Alwaysonyonsn]

I’ve been lucky and never stayed somewhere terrible apart from one place.

No one at the front desk for half an hour. I called the number left and no one answered. Knocked on the office door (could hear people) and no one answered.

The room didn’t lock and they pretended not to understand. I had to carry any valuables with me whenever I left.

I once went on holiday for a week and was bed bound the entire time with some horrible illness. The hotel etc was fine, I was not.

Tenerife after uni. Horrible place, cold winds, dirty looking sand, and all my friends had strange personality transplants and instead of having fun, exploring, going out at night, just sat by the pool (not hot enough) in the day and sat in the apartment at night. Miserable.

Florida in an awful timeshare in the middle of a bunch of golf clubs with ex pretending to have cancer while spending most of the time on the phone to OW.

Took the DC away one summer for a week in Kent. Hated it, pissed down for the week, the airbnb was grubby, the area we stayed in was a dump plus it was expensive. We packed up and left 3 days early and vouched never to have another summer holiday in the UK unless it was last minute and we knew the weather would be good.

Lanzarote. Grim and run down.

Many years ago before online booking and trip advisor reviews when booking was from a brochure I went to a hotel so awful in Portugal it was on that TV show Holidays From Hell!

The hotel was quite a building site and the complex divided by a footbridge with the motorway running through the middle!

I was a single mum years ago on a tight budget and I saved for months to take the kids to haven
I was 8 months pregnant with didn’t help but it pissed it down the whole week and we nearly got flooded out
we didn’t have a tv,I don’t drive so couldn’t leave the base and everything cost money-crazy golf cost £15 for 12 minuteS
We where close to the night entertainment and it went on every night-for what felt like forever
It was cold,boring and very wet-I was so glad to go home

cos I’m a fool,we went back years later with a friend-by this time we had 9 kids between us
ive known her since we where 12,but I really got to know her that week and bloody hell,never again
she seemed to think my eldest was her babysitter,left me with all the kids all the time,cooked food mine didn’t like-leaving me with the stack of washing up,I had my money but her parents gave her an unlimited budget so her lot where doing stuff I couldn’t afford and her eldest kept rubbing their faces in it
her eldest was a nightmare-same age as my no3 but you wouldn’t have known it-and she kept ignoring his behaviour so it was left to me to stop him hurting/killing himself
the final straw was when we where packing to leave,and he suddenly hurt his ankle-which meant he didn’t have to do anything to help and her evil sil thought she could treat me like shit
as soon as everything was packed,he recovered and was fine-and sil started screaming at me because I had my own kids (and hers) to deal with-I couldn’t take her two as well (11 kids on my own?no thanks)
plus she’d been so nasty to us that I never wanted to hear her name let alone look after her kids while she got pissed

we are still friends but we agreed never again

Cuba - such bad food poisoning I ate nothing for four days and could only stomach bread and sometimes a bit of cheese after that.

Wales.... it rained all week, I got rammed by a trolley in the local Tesco because i didnt move quickly enough when told to move and ended up with a bruised side (literally had nowhere to move to i was between a shelf and a mannequin). Parents were to busy getting drunk to supervise their children and i had to climb in to soft play and rescue DS 3yrs from a child who was twice his age who was calling him names and throwing balls at him, parents were busy drinking and playing bingo and when i approached them and told them they threw a beer mat at me and told me to fuck off.

Went to Barcelona two days after having my wisdom teeth removed. Tried so hard to have a lovely time but spent most of it in bed recovering..

My DM got married when I was doing my GCSEs and, because their honeymoon was booked for the winter, she wanted a family holiday immediately afterwards. I'm the youngest sibling and the wedding and holiday fell during my GCSE exams. DM booked the holiday to get home on the morning of my Maths GCSE exam. I told her I was worried about my exams but she told me the whole time leading up to it how it would be great, I could revise by the pool or at the beach blah blah blah... We get to the holiday and I tried to revise on the way (driving down to Italy) but got so car sick. Then, the whole time there, she'd stop me revising - wanting to go for lunch, wanting me to go in the water, play cards, go on a bike ride etc. By the end of the holiday, I'd done no revision on anything and was exhausted and stressed beyond belief. We got stuck in traffic in France and missed our ferry so I ended up having to be dropped straight at the school a few minutes after the exam had started and literally run into the reception to sit the exam. I'd been throwing up constantly in the car from car sickness and trying to revise too. Luckily they let me start late but I did awfully and had multiple other exams that week and the week after too. Then, my mum had the audacity to complain about my maths grade and me not working hard enough and "taking holidays" when we got my results in the August. Secretly, I've never forgiven her.

And then, every single year, I'll see at least one thread on here where the OP wants to do a holiday during exams because it's cheaper than during school holidays and every other poster saying how exam results don't matter and to think of their mental health and to book it before it's too late and they've left home...

An all inclusive in the Dominican Republic. The food was terrible, the same every day, and the person I'd gone with decided being drunk every day was the way to go.
I was bored stupid, surrounded by drunks and couldn't wait to get home.

Not a classic holiday 😀

Brean sands. Shameless on steroids.

@Mummbles That’s horrendous. How could she do that to you - and then blame you!

Cottage in rural Derbyshire over Xmas, 1995. It was SO cold, the cottage was much more 'basic' than it had looked in the photos (brochure in those days, no internet booking, etc) and being away from our home - which had seemed a great idea - proved to be very depressing. We went home on Boxing Day, 3 days early.

Two come to mind.

One in Spain, maybe near Torrevieja, but I can't properly remember. Stayed with friends in a house on one of those resort places. It was February. It was cold in the accommodation and then the hot water gave up. Boyfriend and friends DH went missing playing golf one day and wandered back hours and hours after we expected them.

Second was a Monday to Friday at Center Parcs. Felt trapped on site. It was grubby. It rained. Youngest DD finally got norovirus from the human soup/pool. We left a day early after she had chundered about 9 times in the cabin on every available bed sheet. Hated every moment before she was sick but the vomiting really was an excellent end. And we paid a bloody fortune to go. That was 10 years ago. We've never ever considered going back.

Tunisia. There was just a horrible atmosphere of open hostility and constant harassment including being yanked into shop doorways when passing, being advised by the rep at the welcome meeting that if going out you should tell reception where you're going and when you'll be back as well as advising to use the hotel bus rather than local taxis, witnessing security beating up a young teen (13 or 14) for trying to sell fruit on the private beach, and more. Its the only country where I've felt both unsafe and unwelcome.

Sunny beach in Bulgaria but to be fair in the 1980's with small DS, it may have improved since then.
Whole place stank of sewage, the apartment was a dump and there was nothing to do except paddle with DS in the sea.
OK for a few days but not two weeks.

🤣 did you go to the Pontins there ?

I live near there, Berrow beach is much nicer, Brean is holiday caravan hell.

Brean is famous for Dion Fortune's book, the Sea Priestess. But when she wrote it there were no holiday parks just an endless misty and very atmospheric landscape.

She'd be rolling in her grave now.

Omg - Club Praia da Rocha I suspect. I was a holiday rep there, worst months of my life - constant abuse and physical threats from customers (men twice my size).

Cornwall last year.

Rained every day for 2 weeks, stuck in middle of nowhere, everywhere absolutely rammed, toilets at campsite constantly filthy, campsite also cost an absolute fortune.

This year on my holiday I ended up in hospital and it was still better than that holiday

Week away to Spain with my boyfriend of 5 years and another couple - my boyfriend decided to dump me the night before we went. We decided to still go (we were young and stupid, and had decided we could handle it), but it was a throughly miserable week for all of us!

Rome. Our air bnb was absolutely freezing and the owner refused to give us the code for the heating so he came over and set the heaters for just an hour a day. It also wasn't a very nice apartment. It was torrential rain when we arrived and I was so very sick the entire duration that I just couldn't enjoy anything.

Jersey. The place and hotel were fine. I spent the whole time with migraine.

Also had similar issues in Edinburgh. Where I wasn't aware that I'd lost part of my vision and wanted to just vomit all day.