Have you ever done something and it was just one big ol’ disappointment? I know Joe and I have. We even made a list of the 10 most disappointing places we’ve visited. And it didn’t include this place, or even this one – they’re also both WAAAY down on my list of places I ever want to visit again. 😉

Although we don’t mind sharing what tourist attractions we are less than thrilled with, we never really went into what cities we didn’t like visiting. And trust me, there are a few. But we figure we might say we hate a particular city and what if, I dunno, you live there? How rude would that be?

But other people? They don’t seem to mind as much. 😉

A while back someone on Reddit, named u/0_7_0, asked their peers, “What city disappointed you the most when visiting?” It brought up a lot of conversation – like nearly 7,000 comments’ worth! I won’t go into every one of them, but these are the places that appeared to be, shall we say, a trend.

I’m including them in alphabetical order. Adult language edited:

Atlantic City

• It’s waayyy dirtier and run down than I thought it’d be. – User_492006
• Flew there for a convention, and was excited to stay at Caesars, because the one in Vegas was really great back in the day.
  The ceiling above the fountain in the main lobby was covered in mold.
  A-hole drunken wiseguys (literally) yelling and taunting people at the craps table.
  A pimp with his three employees leaving early in the morning when we were heading out for our flight.
  Holy f**k what a cesspool. – dr_freudenstein
• Grossest city I’ve ever visited. I couldn’t get out fast enough.
  We were sitting in traffic on Atlantic Avenue around midnight trying to leave. We watched a man walk out of the hospital wearing only his gown with one of those walking IV fluid poles, IV still attached to his arm. He walked through traffic and into the Greyhound bus station. This was after seeing dozens of feral cats in the parking lot at the House of Blues.
  It’s the city God forgot. – TheBimpo
• It’s nicknamed Atlantic Shitty for a reason – nails_tails_ales
• It’s basically a ghetto outside of the boardwalk area. And even the boardwalk is a ghost town these days. Nobody goes to AC anymore. It’s just old people in the casinos. Been going to AC for years, and this year might be the last time. – cjinl

Austin

• Austin, Texas. Lived there in the ‘90s and it was pretty great. Now it’s an overcrowded, overpriced douchey mess. – DontShootTheFood
• As someone who grew up in & currently lives in Austin, you are 100% correct. The area is great to visit but horrible to stay in for any long-term period of time. And alot of what made up Austin’s “Stay Weird” culture has vanished with the population boom, especially in downtown. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty in Austin and the surrounding area to have a fun & interesting trip if you’re visiting. But don’t move here. It’s so damn expensive, the population in the city & all the surrounding suburbs has exploded too quickly for infrastructure to keep up, and honestly the snobby attitude of some of the people (especially our local leaders) is becoming increasingly more noticeable. It used to still have the combination of Stay Weird hippy town mixed with Southern hospitality and small town community feel. Both of those have pretty much vanished now. – BethG_99
• Austin has changed a lot in the past few years. For the worse I’d say. It was fine as a middle sized city, but the big city transformation is just ruining it. Also, f*** I-35 – brublanc

Bali

• Bali changed so much the last 10 years. It used to be so beautiful and amazing… now it is full of “digital nomad” douchebags and overpriced food and crap. I remember when it was just a cool surf spot with cheap eats – HippoNo9775

Beijing

• I arrived at the end of a trans- Mongolian rail trip seeing so many incredible places and I think it was just a huge anticlimax. Was intimidated by the level of armed security everywhere, had to fight off so many scammers, didn’t enjoy being touched and laughed at when on the subway (I’m a very white European with curly hair). Overall just found it really challenging despite some amazing sights. – Teapigs1984
• Not to mention sometimes pollution is so high that it can be challenging to be outdoors, also I noticed that cars tend to not stop with the red light so it can be hard to cross the street – nina0097
• I’m a white American, I went to Beijing as part of a group of Americans. It’s worst in the touristy parts of Beijing because there are a lot of people from more rural areas coming to visit the capital for the first time who have never seen white or Black people before. They will take photos, touch you, no boundaries. I tried to help get this girl in our group out from a queue of people who were taking photos with her at the palace of empress dowager Cixi and a second queue formed for people to take photos with me. To me, that was all just funny. What was not funny was the racism directed towards the Black people in our group. People on the street called one Black girl in our group the N-word. – Intrepid_Law_4918
• Came to say Beijing as well. My experience was 10 years ago. Scammer, rip offs, dangerous traffic, just generally felt unsafe, and even food. I emphasize 10 years ago because China is developing so rapidly so don’t know what it’s like now. But yeah I was disappointed. – Mourning_Dov3

  Beijing. It actually started before we even got into the city, with one engine of our Chinese airliner suddenly having mechanical failure. We had to turn around and limp (and pray) 30 minutes back to Hong Kong…
  After finally arriving in the Chinese capital, it was dirty. The toilets made me feel lucky to be able to stand and pee. The food was meh. But what was most disappointing was the people. My heritage is Chinese and “going home” to see my ancestral land was so exciting! However, having lunch in a restaurant, a father sitting at a nearby table glared at my family, teaching his young children that we were outcasts and not pure Chinese (despite both of my parents born there). Hint to that father: yes, we could totally understand what you were saying. From that day during our trip, many more tales of negativity arose. It was just heart-breaking to be honest, because here are my “Chinese brothers and sisters” outright shunning us. – WpnZero

Dubai

• Dubai. Decided to spend 10 days there while passing through. Had enough of it after 24 hours. Too many f$#&!&# malls. No culture. – wric84
• I lived and grew up in Dubai before being accepted by Canada. Never going back there. That country was built on the blood and souls of cheap labour from Pakistan, India, Sri lanka, Bangladesh – mal1k7
• Horrid place, fancy malls and hotels for the westerners, but the streets are full of the poor / slaves. You really see what misery the whole place is built on. I went there for work, I can’t imagine how people can go there for fun. – c19isdeadly

• Went there in July, just homeless people everywhere. Literal s**t on the ground on almost every corner and in parking garages. People digging in trash cans tweaked out. I was uncomfortable most of the time. Only normal part of the walk of fame was in front of the theater and in that mall area, otherwise I was scared of what I might see. – DBelland1515
• Also, many people confuse LA and Hollywood. So many tourists come to the city to sees Grauman’s, the sign, the walk of fame, etc. and don’t realize most of the “Hollywood sights” are on literally one block. And super gross. Whenever I have people visit, they want to go there and are so disappointed bc it takes all of 15 minutes and have no idea what else they’d like to see. – grannyjones143
• Hollywood… I always imagined it was a city full of glamour, it is not. – rubbersou

Marrakesh

• i know everyone loves Marrakesh, but i hated it. it would have been amazing before about 2000, but now it just feels like a disneyland version of their culture to cater to western tourists. ali baba costumes pretending to be desert nomads. half of their ‘hand made goods’ are just cheap shit from china. and u cant walk 20 feet without being aporoached by scammers. like, literally every block
  the entire city just feels like a facade to attract dumb tourist money – legshampoo
• Went to Marrakesh a couple of years back and shared the exact same experience. Thought it would be magical, but the exact opposite. Went to jemma el fna square and this guy put his chained up monkey on my back and kept annoying me for money until I ran away. Then I ended up with horrible food poisoning, the food was repulsive and it’s strange how it’s given so much clout for being one of the best cuisines in the world. – rainbow_unicorn20
• Sorry that happened to you. We went to Jemma el-Fnaa our first morning there. Between the noise, smells, human spectacle and general sensory overload we maybe had our guard down. Pregnant lady grabs my hand and starts doing henna, all the while I pull my hand back and keep telling her no. This took maybe 20 seconds. Then she starts yelling at me demanding payment. We were both confused and frankly a little scared so I pulled out cash thinking I would find her a $1 bill. She grabbed the $20 that was in my hand and walked away. Not sure of the legal terminology but this has to be some sort of assault/theft. That kind of set the tone for absolutely incessant haggling by locals. Maybe I don’t feel like having a screaming match every time I need a taxi, or else I pay 10 times the rate. Food was generally pretty bad, but we did not get sick. Being outside of your hotel room was a stressful experience as you always had to watch your back and turn down all sorts of people. Very rich, interesting history and culture, but I would never go back, or definitely not on my own dime. – JamJammerz
• The exact same thing happened to me with the Henna lady too!!!!! She grabbed me and started doing henna on my hand and I kept saying no thank you lmao. Then after that this weird guy put his gigantic yellow-white python on my sister for a picture and got upset when we paid him because he said it wasn’t enough. Another guy tried to sell my dad fake Gucci glasses and wouldn’t leave him alone until he bought them. I stayed in an air bnb and it was wonderful but that was the only good part of the trip tbh. I feel bad for the people because their king has this gigantic a** palace there and his people are legit starving on the streets outside it. Once thing I thought that was really strange is that although the people are poor and knowing how corrupt the king is, every single store I went to had his face plastered on the walls and every single local was praising him smh
  I completely agree with ur last part and feel the exact same way, lovely culture but after such a bad experience i don’t think I’ll ever visit Marrakesh or Morocco again. (No offence any Moroccans reading this) – rainbow_unicorn20

Naples

New York City

• So NYC itself was not disappointing, I loved the city but was very disappointed at the non existence of public restrooms. – passthegrass4201 (harrumph – they obviously didn’t read this 😉 )
• Manhattan smells like trash. Constantly. There is very little infrastructure for waste management for a city filled with 100 stories of office buildings, restaurants, and apartments, so on trash day you walk by 8-foot tall walls of trash bags stacked up on the sidewalk waiting for the trash trucks. And on a hot August day, ugh. The whole city just stinks. –Virtual-Stranger
• I always dreamed of going to NYC. When I turned 15 it was my lifegoal to go there one day. When I was 23 I finally went and it was really fun. I even teared up on my first day when I was at Times Square in the evening. But my god, I did not expect to see so much garbage and insects everywhere. – MadameMagika

Paris

• Paris. Seems they hate pretty much everyone, not just Americans. It was nice to see the Mona Lisa for 2 seconds I guess. People were standing around her for 30 minutes at a time so it was impossible to get a good look. Food 10/10. I think the only memorable nice people I met there were italians. I would like to go to France again, just not Paris. – Elphafox
• Paris, it is so dirty and the metro is rammed at all times and stinks – EnglishP***k095
• Paris. It is both stunning beautiful and incredibly filthy. Also I have never seen so many beggars and scammers, literally gangs of roma gypsie kids swamping people and picking pockets and bags aggressively. – George_anon

I especially appreciated the people who were the most realistic:

• I think people in the comments had unrealistic expectations of cities. Going to a city expecting it to be perfectly clean with no homeless people is like going to the countryside expecting not to see cow shit. Go to pretty much any city in the world, and you’ll see trash and smell urine. You see the same thing in the countryside, but there’s less of it because there are fewer people. Cities are great. They have more music, art, plays, social dancing, etc. because there are so many people in close proximity. Towns and rural areas are cleaner and quieter, and that gets romanticized in movies, but if I went there expecting a big art and music scene and a good hospital nearby that would be unrealistic. – Prestigious-Owl-6397
• Agreed. Seeing Paris so high in the comments left me baffled as to what people actually want to see in a city.
  For me it’s the absolute most beautiful city I’ve been to, and of course I saw the homeless and the not so safe areas around the north side and the train stations etc.
  But it is absolutely so full of history, art and culinary places that you cannot miss and cannot find anywhere else.
  To each their own I guess. – Aezzle
• Every city:
  What people think it is: 🏰🏖🌇🏞🤩🗽🌁🎡🚋🌞🏘
  What it is eventually: 🚗🚗🚗🚗🚗🚦🚗🚗⛽🚗🚗🚗🚦🚗🚗🚗🚗⛽🚗🚗🥲 – russianbearscares
• My biggest takeaway from most of these answers is that most of the people here either don’t live in a city or have not travelled very much at all. Do people seriously expect cities around the world to be like Disneyland? Yes, there’s rubbish and homeless people in every city and if you don’t expect that you’re going to be disappointed anywhere – SecularStagflation

Our take on this

For sure, 100%, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

The first time we went to Paris, I hated it. HATED it. But I was only a young adult, not particularly mature, and the stuff Paris had to offer weren’t the things I was interested in at the time. One of these days we’re going to go back and I’m sure I will appreciate it much, much more (I mean, geez, the architecture ALONE…!).

People also dissed New York City. I ADORE New York. Granted I grew up there, so to me it’s “normal.” I never thought a NY accent would give me warm fuzzies, but after living away from there for a coupla years less than a quarter of a century now, it actually does, believe it or not.

Which just goes to show you that everyone has an opinion and opinions are never right or wrong – they just “are.”

Feature Photo: Tomascastelazo / wikimedia

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