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When you travel for pleasure, you may see a lot of good and bad stuff. You know what I mean – for every Hoover Dam, national park or huge cathedral, you’ll also get your share of, oh, I dunno, let’s say South of the Border.

Personally, I adore South of the Border, but I’m into kitschy stuff like that. I know many other people are not fans, because it’s just a big ol’ tourist trap.

With the advent of the internet, it’s pretty easy to determine which tourist attractions are decent and which are tourist traps. All you really need to do is look at a huge site like TripAdvisor.

With all of its millions upon millions of reviews, have you ever wondered what places are the biggest tourist traps? Casago did – they’re a vacation rentals and a property management company. They decided to see which places around the U.S., as well as the world, were labeled as “tourist traps” by TripAdvisor members.

Their methodology

From Casago:

To find the biggest tourist traps in the world, we first searched for the phrase ‘tourist trap’ on TripAdvisor without setting a location filter, which defaults the search setting to ‘worldwide.’ We were then able to gather the names of attractions/places, addresses and the number of mentions of the phrase ‘tourist trap’ in accompanying reviews. The world’s top 10 biggest tourist traps are those with the highest number of mentions of the phrase ‘tourist trap’ in reviews.

We then repeated this process by changing the location filter on TripAdvisor for each country and each U.S. state. We removed entries that indicated that the attraction/place was not a tourist trap, e.g., if the review contained word combinations such as ‘not a trap,’ ‘not a tourist trap,’ ‘not tourist trap,’ ‘not trap,’ ‘wasn’t a trap’ etc.

For our world analysis, we set a minimum threshold of 10 mentions of the phrase ‘tourist trap.’ For each country and U.S. state, the threshold was set at five or more mentions.

Please note that tourist traps can refer to a range of experiences and impressions about a place, including how it looks, where it’s located, the general atmosphere or the style of the service. Not all mentions of ‘tourist trap’ necessarily equate to a poor experience from the person who reviewed the attraction.

Key findings

Talk about spoilers! Here were Casago’s key findings:

• Four of the world’s top 10 biggest tourist traps are located in the U.S.
• Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco is the biggest tourist trap in the U.S. and the world, counting 1,049 mentions of the phrase ‘tourist trap’ in reviews
• Barcelona’s Las Ramblas street (793 mentions) is the second-biggest tourist trap in the world, followed by Hawaii’s Dole Plantation (708 mentions)

The biggest tourist traps in the U.S.

Hey, I’ve only been to one of those! (Fisherman’s Wharf. At least 3 different vacations LOL). But San Francisco’s tourist mecca of restaurants and crap shops isn’t the only winner for tourist traps in the U.S. Every state has ’em, and Casago listed them all. You can click here to see them all, but here’s an idea of the touristy trappiness in other states:

• Florida – Duval Street (Key West)
• Georgia – Historic River Street (Savannah)
• Hawaii – Dole Plantation (Wahiawa)
• Illinois – Navy Pier (Chicago)
• Louisiana – Cafe du Monde (New Orleans)
• Michigan – Mystery Spot (St. Ignace)
• New York – Times Square (New York City)
• Tennessee – Graceland (Memphis)
• Texas – Big Texas Steak Ranch (Amarillo)
• Washington – Pike Place Market (Seattle)

The ten biggest tourist traps worldwide

Of course, there are plenty of tourist traps all around the world. These are the top ten (you can also click here to see them).:

1. Fisherman’s Wharf (San Francisco, CA, USA) (1,049 mentions of being a tourist trap)
2. Las Ramblas (Barcelona, Spain) (793 mentions)
3. Dole Plantation (Wahiawa, HI) (708)
4. Temple Bar (Dublin, Ireland) (673)
5. Blue Lagoon, Grindavik, Iceland (669) (we skipped that one and went here instead. THAT one was definitely NOT a tourist trap)
6. Checkpoint Charlie (Berlin, Germany (664)
7. Times Square (New York City, NY, USA) (661)
8. Cafe du Monde (New Orleans, LA, USA) (643)
9. Hofbrausaus (Munich, Germany) (522)
10. Guinness Storehouse (Dublin, Ireland) (516)

So I may or may not have gone to 5 (#1, 4, 7, 8, and 10). Some of them more than once. Times Square MANY times. How about you?

And since I know you’re dying to tell me…which tourist traps did they miss?

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