The Most Overrated Cities in the World, According to Google

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Have you ever visited a location—one that EVERYONE is talking about—and discovered it wasn’t ‘all that’? Yeah, me too (for me it was The Jewel, in Singapore. I mean, it was fine. But for the most part, it was just a mall with some extra features. I was expecting more).

It turns out there are plenty of places that fit into the category of ‘I heard so much about it, but it wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it would be.’ And, not surprisingly, people are more than willing to say so in their reviews online.

So which places underwhelm tourists the most? Radical Storage, a luggage storage network, set to find out.

Before I get into their findings – if there’s one thing I’ve discovered, it’s that when a travel company conducts a survey, they may or may not follow up with a similar survey in later years, to see if opinions have changed. This seems to be especially true with smaller companies.

Radical Storage, for example, studied opinions on TripAdvisor back in 2021, then updated it in 2022 (we reported on that one), and after that, it was radio silence.

Until now.

Radical Storage is back with their 2025 version of “The Paris Syndrome Report: Which Cities Underwhelm Tourists the Most?”

Wait, what is Paris Syndrome?

“Paris Syndrome” is a real-life psychological condition that can be experienced by first-time visitors to Paris who are extremely disappointed that the city did not meet their expectations. However, for it to truly be labeled as Paris Syndrome, tourists would be experiencing symptoms such as anxiety, depersonalization, dizziness, rapid heartbeat, sweating and/or vomiting.

Not that every person who wound up being disappointed in a city is experiencing Paris Syndrome – the symptoms would need to be extreme, and a doctor would need to make the call of an official diagnosis, anyway. But just as someone who is feeling a little sad one day might say they’re having a “major depression” (no, they’re not), Radical Storage is comparing being underwhelmed by a city to having Paris Syndrome. Just clarifying.

Anyway, here’s how they determined their rankings (note that they used Google reviews this time around, not TripAdvisor):

Methodology

We collected 97,409 Google reviews from the ten most-reviewed tourist attractions in 100 cities around the world based on international visitor numbers from EuroMonitor’s Top 100 City Destinations report and Mastercard’s ‘Global Cities Index’.

Russian cities and Kyiv were removed due to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Mecca was discounted due to the fact that it is inaccessible to non-Muslim travelers. Other cities were discounted if they had less than 500 instances of positive and negative comments from tourists. Data was collected in October 2024.

To analyze which cities are most overrated versus most underrated, we looked at the occurrence of a set list of keywords to determine the words that are most frequently used to describe a destination. We then worked out a ratio of how often words associated with “overrated” versus “underrated” were being used to rank the destinations.

The rankings

You would think that “once underwhelming, always underwhelming,” but it turns out that’s not the case. The rankings from 2022 are quite different from today.

Final thought

The funny thing is that the top 3 underwhelming cities for 2025 weren’t even on the top 10 list in 2022.  And to round out the Top 5, apparently while Beijing became more overrated, Orlando became less so. No reasons, hypothetical or fact, as to why that was the case.

Radical Storage also gave the 10 cities that didn’t disappoint, and once again, there were plenty of differences between 2022 and 2025 – you can check them out on this page of their website.

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary