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.

Blimey-in my rush to post about Egypt and amoebic dysentry for whole family - I missed Spain in 1994 with ex partner - where I had an acute biliary attack out the blue due to blocked gallstones and ended up having my gall bladder out under general anaesthetic (a really slash job too for which I still have a huge scar) followed by ICU and catheterised plus oxygen mask and IV antibiotics for a week before being put on a flight- very frightening too when it's away from your home country and language.
Yep that was a holiday to remember!!

Oh and btw - he is running one of the best known and loved bars in Marmaris to this day. I did try to warn others, many times, but his adoring flock of British sweethearts completely turned on me.

He also circulated photographs of me to bar owners in the Marmaris area.

I will never, ever set foot back in that country.

Tunisia. Awful food that gave me a terrible stomach the whole time. Greasy meat and tuna in everything. Boiling hot and unfriendly locals (men) who constantly harassed us. Could barely leave the hotel and there was one tiny pool there. Boring

Malta, went with my boyfriend who I discovered soon after was cheating on me. It was my birthday and I paid for the trip. He had nothing to contribute and didn’t even get me a card. It was cold and all he wanted to do was get drunk and hang around British pubs. Loser.

I must be lucky as haven't had any really bad holidays like those reported on here .

We had a couple in the early 2000s when we first booked our accommodation independently but weren't able to check out the area as well as we would today so found ourselves staying in a couple of places that weren't ideal - but nothing horrendous like some of your tales .

I'm noting that some destinations keep coming up though!

Pontins. Southport.
Booked three nights stayed one. Filthy noisy awful

Skopje, FYCM. A teenager actually asked on a bus , but why, why did you come here? She had a point

The Azores. Time warp. Absolutely awful food. Hotels dire and hotel service dire. Beautiful little roads but absolutely manic driving. We took our bikes but couldn't use them as the roads were so dangerous.

@HoofWankingSpangleCunt I'm so sorry

For my part it's a toss up between lanzarote with a coin operated tv my then boyfriend kept trying to watch football on and Northumberland where we accidentally rented a house in an old folks complex - weather awful and we argued so so much. Been back since to the area and loved it.
Various a&e experiences but nothing to rival what some poor folk have been through.
Extreme trots in Turkey made me come home thinner but minus a friend

I’ve always loved my trips around the UK. And haven’t had a bad “summer holiday” experience, but I hated New York. I thought I’d love it, but I detested everything about it. Felt really anxious the whole time and couldn’t wait to get home. The buildings are all so big, it felt really oppressive. And you’re constantly barged out if the way just walking down the street. I also had some really bizarre and unsettling encounters with people there. I thought I’d love it, I love every other city I’ve been to, but it’s somewhere I wouldn’t go back to if you paid me.

Parkdean holiday at Pendine Sands. In a grotty shithole of a van in April - and it snowed. We were beyond frozen, just a gas fire in living area so we went to Argos and bought 2 fan heaters. At 10pm they tripped the electricity and no one would answer calls so we sat shivering huddled all night around a smelly gas fire. 3 kids in tears and DH moaning all night threatening to drive home. It was horrific and reception just offered an extra duvet. We packed up in disgust, it really was a dump of a site. Drove round the coast to Haven in Tenby and rented a grotty old van (we had the dog) but it had central heating - I spent 3 hours cleaning it before we put our stuff inside. That was our last ever caravan holiday!

I have a few.

i lived in Australia for many years, and popped over to NZ for a well deserved break. Hired a camper to tour the South Island. Started off heading to beautiful village just below the ski slopes. DH was coming down with a cold. we got parked at a campsite and the temperature unseasonably plummeted as the rain and snow just rolled in over the lake lashing at the van.

DH shivering and sweating in the back, and it’s now looking like flu. I took us over to the only hotel, hoping to book a room. unfortunately it was full so I begged the owner to at least let us park up and use the facilities. Instead, She managed to wangle us a room and looked after us like we were family. Soup, honey and lemon, hot water bottles. The works. Good job too as no sooner had DH begun to look a bit better, I started sneezing….we spent the whole fortnight in that hotel. Then went home. Never did get up on the mountain.

few years later, we took a holiday in top end of Northern Territory in Australia. Camping this time, near the coast. DH feeling unwell on the way there, which turns into raging fever from a tooth infection . Had to take him to hospital, they sent us ‘home‘ with antibiotics. But he was too ill to do the 8hr trip home so we camped another night hoping he’d feel better once the medication got to work.

The night a cat 4/5 cyclone veered off course and hit unexpectedly. Well. That was fun. In a tent. (Not). Several tents blew away completely as a tornado came through ripping up trees and tents. Those few who missed that excitement got flooded as the dry river filled up. then burst its banks. We were in a tiny hiking tent, and got lucky — the only buggers on site to evade either misfortune. Because the tent was so small, compared to the clientele of luxury glampers, they had given us a crap pitch up near the road, which was more sheltered and on slightly higher ground.

A week at Pontins holds no fears for us. 🤣

When my sister's and I were young my Dad decided it was his turn to book the family holiday one year. Usually my Mum booked a nice fortnight away somewhere abroad but Dad decided we should have a staycation because there's so much of the UK to see. We understood the sentiment and we were looking forward to our week away.
Dad booked a zero star hotel in Weston Super Mare. It was like Fawlty Towers without the rude-ness. It was comically bad.
All 5 of us were crammed in to a single room, 2 double beds and a single with barely enough room to walk sideways in between them. The shower was in the room. IN THE ACTUAL BEDROOM. The beds got wet from the shower sploshing on them. My mattress had such a deep dip in it that my back is still bad 15 years later from that spine-deforming week away.
Breakfast for us 'children' aged between 9 and 15 years old was a bowl of cornflakes OR a small glass of orange juice. Mum and Dad's cooked breakfast was served on a tiny side plate.
Dad was never allowed to book a holiday again and we still joke about it to this day.

I too have always enjoyed my holidays in the UK. I find the whole airport experience so stressful. And the excessive heat now being experienced in many countries is in my view far more unpleasant than rain.

Oman. I was 6 months pregnant l, couldn't do any of the wadi's. Which is all there is to do there, I was bored out of my mind.

Devon in our caravan when the DC were little. Usually a good break. This time the weather was so bad that everything was permanently damp. We went out in the car in the day just to dry off. And on one day out, a squall blew up and blew down our awning, ripping the canvas of our folding van.

Athens wasn't the worst holiday I've been on and we loved seeing the ancient sites. But the begging and touting in the streets was wearing, and the hotel, while nice enough, was definitely off-season. One day we went out and came back and I wondered why they left a chair tucked up against the built-in headboard/bedside table. We moved the chair to put it by the desk and the whole headboard ensemble fell off the wall to reveal the wires from the built in lamps.

And on one morning when we were going to go down to breakfast, we found we couldn't take the stairs as they had scaffolding platforms built on the stairs so they could reach to wallpaper. So we called the lift instead, and laughed when it opened to reveal that it was completely full of other scaffolding boards and posts and we couldn't go that way either until they cleared off the stairs for us to pass.

Probably slightly dangerous, but we did just laugh at the time.

@honeylulu I've just read your post, I'm glad you're in a better place now, but I am intrigued by the mention of electrocution?!?!

One springs to mind just because it was so bizarre. I was 13/14 and a friend's parents took me on holiday to France. When we got there it transpired we were expected to share a child's portion between us for each meal. So we'd go out, her parents would order for them, and we'd be faced with 2 chicken nuggets and five chips each. There was no veg. We were hungry teenagers!

One day, my friend's dad got lost in Mont St Michel, and my friend innocently told him he'd taken a wrong turn. He was furious and yelled at her for 'correcting' him, even though she was right. Another day he asked us to tell him the french for 'foggy' - we did French at school and he didn't speak it. I told him 'il y a du broulliard'. He then tried to say it to the owner of the place we were staying at, but got it wrong and 'brouillardy?' 'brouillardy?' to her. The woman he was talking to asked me what he was saying, and I explained, and he was furious.

I still have shivers about that holiday - and also the memory of being very, very, very hungry!

The worst were never the places, it was the people I was with. Eg my now ex and I went on holiday to an amazing place, but it was a rotten holiday because he did nothing but put me down and be horrible.

Also Cornwall. Took us two days to get there because the M25 was so bad, then it rained the whole time.

in 1994 there was some terrorism of some sort in Turkey near Bodrum (exploding litter bins - maybe Kurdish separatists or something - I don't know) and therefore the holidays were going dirt cheap. I wanted to go to Halikarnas anyway so a pal and I booked that day and left that very night.

Halikarnas was fantastic and we went every night. The hotel we stayed at was right on the beach: Small and beautiful but the man who owned it and his three sons made our life a misery, letting themselves into our rooms at night when we were sleeping, hiding in the bathrooms and shower cubicles and jumping out at us, groping us in corridors. Then when their advances were politely rebuffed, they said they had been asking around their friends in the resorts and found we had not had sex with anyone and must be lesbians! They took our passports from our rooms and stole bits of gold jewelery etc. They even stole my patent leather stilletto heels. In the end. each of us went to bed after pushing all the furniture against the bedroom doors and sleeping on the floor with feet against the pile.

Looking back, I was a young and happy girl - I would never tolerate that now, but we couldn't stand up for ourselves. We had never met men like that in any other travels. I never went back to Turkey and never will, but I did encounter men like that in many other countries later on.
Halikarnas was worth the trip though.

Five days camping at a Haven site when the DC were 5 and 2. Now exH had left a few weeks before and I'd started divorce proceedings. I took the DC just to get away for a few days. The site was fine and the DC loved it but I was so tired that we went home a day early so I wouldn't have to pack up in the rain.

I've been to quite a few places on this list of horrors, and not had any real issues (Morocco, Turkey, various far East, Crete, etc. - but not so much in the way of holiday resorts.) I've also ended up in hospital twice, and had a car accident on another, and I wouldn't say that completely ruined things!

We did go on a particularly grim holiday to Majorca, not long after 9/11. We got such a cheap deal, but the AI hotel was really weird. The food was samey, and we had a room in a corner without much sun on our balcony. I got sick, and we had to spend 3 days extra, before we could fly home. I wept.
Our relationship was in the early stages of breaking down, too, so that didn't add to the general ambiance.

I let DP pick the hotel we stopped over in on our drive to Hungary. We decided to stop in Germany so about half way.

He picked the cheapest. Which he didn’t realise meant a red light district when we got there.. the window in our room was smashed, and there was a light pull and a light/shade that literally hung centimetres from our face when we led on the bed.

The homeless drug addicts came out like bats in the evening, absolutely everywhere and the noise outside was terrifying knowing the window was smashed and I had vision of some murdeeous homeless man coming in to kill us while we slept.

and we had a room at the end of a hall that was like tucked away in a little alcove type thing.. ans someone stood outside our door at about 3am for ages just mooching about then left a while later. I’ve never wanted to leave someone so quickly but was too scared to go out 😂

and that, is why my DP has never, ever chosen the stopover.. or any place to stay for that matter since :)

My very recent husband and I were not getting on too well ( understatement) so we decided to go for an interesting and maybe even romantic holiday tour of Egypt. The morning we were due to fly out, he announced that he was too ‘busy’ to come. Okay, frankly, he was so weird it was a relief in some ways. I went on my own and was having a pretty good time, friendly group of people who liked talking about the sites etc.

So we were visiting Giza - and STBX popped up literally from behind the Great Pyramid . He was wearing a rather crumpled business suit, so he didn’t bear much resemblance to Peter oToole in Laurence of Arabia. I wouldn’t have minded him coming if he had just gone to the hotel and waited there, but he had to make a big performance of it. Of course the other guests, the guide and most of the local trinket sellers and camel ride people were agog.

he was very annoyed that I hadn’t fallen at his feet in front of the crowd of onlookers and he made a big and noisy scene when we did get back to the hotel. Then he got a cab back to the airport. I went on with the Tour although people did seem a bit wary of me for a bit.

I went on a Nile Cruise with my real husband a few years later, and had a very nice time.

Ha! This is my exact holiday from hell too!!

Praia da Rocha with a dual carriageway running through it. and it rained all week too! You get what you pay for I guess as was £99 pp off Teletext. I was a poor graduate student. TBF, we had quite a good time in the bars with a couple we met from Leicester even though the hotel was grim. Was that you?!