Where was your most disappointing holiday, and why?

[wholetawn]

I'll start off. Our most disappointing trip was to French Polynesia in the South Pacific. The scenario is stunning, but we found the people unhelpful and quite frankly, lazy, unless you were offering to pay them a lot of money to do something small.

Good fucking lord this smacks of racist entitlement. Noone wanted to do your bidding for cheap! Christ almighty.

@EscapeRoomToTheSun I am not sure they meant it in that way??

@CC4712 sorry Euro Disney, now rebranded as Disney Land Paris.

You do realise there’s a huge French (white) population there?

In fact, another reason we disliked it is that it felt like stepping back 50 years into a colony. Never felt that anywhere else.

I’ve never had a truly dreadful holiday, but my worst was Lanzarote.

Its our fault for not researching enough, but we stayed in Puerto del Carmen, which is totally geared to British/Irish tourists, lots of Irish bars and 1 euro English breakfasts. We had half board and the hotel food was awful too - buffet spaghetti is not a pretty sight. We crossed the island to go to Teguise for the local craft market - turned out to be full of people selling rip-off Louis Vuitton. The worst was when we hired a taxi to go to the north of the island to an amazing village with a great restaurant recommended by a friend of DH. It was extortionately expensive, and we got there it was completely dead with two beachside bars selling the same crap they had in Puerto del Carmen. The only other thing to do there was the Aloe Vera museum, and we couldn’t face it and left after having lunch. Complete waste of money.

But I did have lots of lovely swims in the sea, and the Timanfeya park was interesting. Just would never go back!

Puerto Rico. I'd foolishly agreed to go with someone that I wasn't intending to stay with, because it had been a tough year and I needed a rest.

The all-inclusive resort was packed with the type of people who think being drunk 24/7 is fun, the food was terrible and my companion turned into a sex pest, when all I really wanted to do was relax, swim, and lie on my sun lounger in the shade reading a book.

When he didn't get his own way, he whined like a spoilt 3yo.

Iceland. Totally overrated!

Oh god so many to choose from, worst probably Jordan- tried to get extorted to buy back my shitty sunglasses I'd lost in a taxi by being driven out to the middle of nowhere and threatened. Taxi driver on way in was pissed, I was convinced we'd die. Ate gone off Humus and had the shits on a plane so old felt like it was falling apart, even chilled DH looked worried. General feeling of poverty and desperation everywhere and the inevitable crime that comes with it. However also saw Petra which was amazing and we still laugh about this trip years later. But we'll never go back.
Most surprising positive trip- Sarajevo on my own, staying in hostels. Interesting place and good people.

@Bluebells1970 we didn't like the Algarve much either and thought the food was somewhat crap too compared to Spain - love Nerja - I don't get the raving about it either and it's not great for sea swimming .

Anaxos, Lesvos.
Carefully picked a small complex of studios. The brochure didn't tell you about the apartments that had been built or that 2 other sets of apartments could use the pool. This was pre tripadvisor days. So no sunbeds and a pool full of children.
The euro had just come in and prices were up . Greek holiday makers had gone elsewhere and there were some v depressed bar owners with half empty bars.
I was bitten badly by every critter going. And no pharmacy in the town.
Lesvos was lovely it was just an unfortunate combination of things.

Turkey (Side) in Feb - cold and empty. It was cheap tho and still loads of lovely cats 🤣

Tunisia. Some breathtaking sites, but otherwise filthy, with nonstop groping and leering by men despite my clothing covering everything.

Prague. It was freezing, pints of horrible wine, a very miserable boyfriend big live carp in small buckets, oversalted bland food - all of it without exception, teenage druggies everywhere, a feeling of impending doom everywhere. It was 25 years ago so I'm sure it's better now!

We're off to Italy tomorrow for a week to visit our student DD who is on a year abroad. Venice area.

I've been watching the weather forecast for the region avidly and it looks set to improve a lot. Fingers crossed.

"Are you sure this happened in Gran Canaria?"

It had a big gay scene way back before then @Ladysaurus but those hair braiding women were rough. They'd grab young girls and be ragging their hair within seconds. I got grabbed too in 1990, thankfully they didn't turn on my mum when she said no.

I flew out for a romantic break with boyfriend...now ex-boyfriend...because of how he acted on that holiday. It was the Canary Islands, sunny weather, lovely food, amazing scenery...and he was pure misery. He moaned about walking anywhere, he didn't like taking the bus, he didn't like taking taxi rides, he didn't like the food, he didn't like Spanish TV, he didn't bring enough money so I paid more than my fair share and he didn't want to go anywhere. His racist prejudice was on full display for the first time. He never stopped complaining and was only happy getting hammered in the 'British' bar. He didn't offer to pay his fair share, refused to try any food that wasn't chips and complained about the other guests. It was a real eye opener about who I was dating, and I was happy to part company upon our return. He was so bored he started to get amusement from being abusive to me. Life is too short and I could have been anywhere in the world, and still have an awful holiday with him tagging along.

Puglia

But nothing to do with Puglia, just disaster villa, tiny kids, major family stress, and my Dad got ill so I spent half of it in the hospital.

I was only there for a week because of work, and I have to say I pretty much kissed the ground of Stansted when I got back. Everyone else was there for 2 weeks and my sister swears to this day I went home earlier than planned (I didn’t)

When I was in my twenties, had recently split up with my boyfriend, so went on holiday to Turkey with two male friends at the last minute to try and cheer myself up.
We went to a Karaoke bar one night in the next resort which wasn't really my thing, so decided to leave them to it. Queued up at an official taxi rank but the driver turned out to be a sleaze, and asked me to come back to his place and drink vodka. When I refused he started swearing and waving his arms around agressively, so I told him to stop and let me out, and as I recognised we were just coming into the resort where I was staying, thought I'd be safe to walk the rest of the way back to my hotel. It was quite a big resort though and I needed to walk through the main drag and to the other end of the resort, and my hotel was at the top of a hill. Everywhere was closed and it was really quiet, and around halfway there a young teenage boy who was really skinny and around 13 started following me and touching me. I passed by two middle aged local men and asked them if they could help me and tell the boy to go away, but they just laughed and then started talking to the boy and sounded as though they were encouraging him. For the next ten minutes or so the boy followed me until the next time he grabbed me I hit him quite hard and he ran away. Got to the bottom of the hill where the hotel was and he was there waiting for me and jumped out on me from nowhere, so I hit him again and he ran away. Further up the hill I thought I'd lost him, when suddenly he jumped out on me again, this time I pushed him so hard out of fear and desparation that he fell over. I decided to run for it and made it back to the hotel. I then realised I didn't have the card to get into my room so had to ask the man on reception to let me into my room, and to cap it all off, when we got outside my room he also turned sleazy and tried to kiss me!

Agree about Dublin being v overrated, though much of Ireland I love.

Paris I quite like, but agree it’s over egged

Turkey - hounded by men all day every day over blond hair & money. Hideous

While I prefer Maui there’s definitely a lot more to do in Ohau than drinking and sunbathing but yes it is expensive.

Turkey. Hands down the worst holiday I've ever had. Spent the entire time with my young daughters being harassed by men, some of whom were very unpleasant.

This also continued at our hotel; it was a horrible and intimidating experience. Couldn't wait to get home; there is no amount of money in the world that would induce me to return.

Holiday with a toddler in Ireland went a bit awry when the country cottage I’d booked turned out to be damp and cold (we were probably the first guests of the season). We ditched it for a local B&B where they were happy to babysit the sleeping toddler whilst we slipped out to the local pub. Result!

I’ve generally had great holidays in all sorts of places, but I didn’t enjoy going to Israel for work - being followed, spat at, name calling etc made me pretty uncomfortable (and that was with a male colleague nearby).

How did you reach this conclusion? jeez.

Morocco, have been twice and was really desperate to like it but we just didn’t (was with my now husband so didn’t get hassled too much but the general treatment of women didn’t sit well).

on the other hand we had a wonderful holiday in Turkey in 2019 and an alright time in Egypt in 2021 (we were in Egypt during height of Covid due to unavoidable circumstances so think it probably wasn’t representative of normal times and we weren’t viewing it as a holiday so our expectations were low).