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A tourist trap is an establishment that has been created or re-purposed with the aim of attracting tourists and their money. Tourist traps will typically provide overpriced services, entertainment, food, souvenirs and other products for tourists to purchase. Wikipedia
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Excerpts from:
USA Today
Top 100 biggest tourist traps worldwide
BLUEPRINT
Updated 6:06 a.m. ET Aug. 24, 2023
When you’re planning the perfect vacation, you don’t want to spend your time or money on a tourist trap that disappoints. To help you avoid a case of destination letdown, we turned to the treasure trove of data found in online reviews that can help savvy travelers make the most of their vacation planning.
In July 2023, we analyzed 23.2 million Google reviews of the 500 most popular tourist attractions in the world, spanning 65 countries in six continents. For each attraction, we asked a simple question: How frequently do the reviews mention the terms “tourist trap,” “overrated” or “expensive”?
We compared attractions to one another by measuring the relative frequency of these mentions, dividing the number of mentions in each case by the total number of reviews for that attraction. We break down our findings, so you are armed with the information you need before planning to visit a popular tourist destination, and offer tips on how to travel in a way that’s good for your wanderlust and your wallet.
Key findings
- The Four Corners Monument (in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah) is the No. 1 tourist trap in the world, according to our analysis.
- The Blue Lagoon in Iceland and Penang Hill in Malaysia are the top tourist traps in Europe and Asia.
- The Great Mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia had 397,905 reviews on Google, as of our analysis, and not a single one mentioned “tourist trap.”
- The California Academy of Sciences, Elvis Presley’s Graceland and the South Carolina Aquarium are the most overpriced attractions in the United States.
- Voodoo Doughnut in Portland, Oregon, is the most overrated tourist attraction in the world.
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Methodology
In July 2023, we analyzed 23.2 million Google reviews of 500 popular tourist attractions in the world, spanning 65 countries in six continents.
We focused our analysis on mentions of certain keywords that indicate a common negative sentiment among visitors. Those keywords are: “tourist trap”, “expensive”, and “overrated”.
It’s true that a few uses of these keywords do not fit in a negative context (e.g. “It’s kind of a tourist trap but we loved it!”). Based on our analysis, these positive instances of usage were not frequent enough to be statistically significant, and in any case, they are consistent enough across attractions to cancel each other out.
We began with a list of 1,600 tourist attractions for consideration, before narrowing to our final 500. We removed from this list, with only a few exceptions, all national parks, state parks, lakes, and mountains. We also removed sports stadiums. The list was further reduced based on the total number of reviews submitted for each attraction.
All reviews analyzed were written in English.
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/credit-cards/biggest-tourist-traps-in-the-world/
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