Cancun to Times Square: How to Spot a Tourist Trap

Travel Blog • Julia Ross • 10.23.07 | 3:00 PM ET

How do you know a tourist trap when you see one? Aside from the double-decker buses and fanny packs, I’m usually alerted by a feeling I get: an overwhelming desire to flee mixed with befuddlement. The first time I visited San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, I remember thinking: I don’t get it. Choosing the world’s top tourist traps is sure to elicit heated debate, but ForbesTraveler.com has weighed in with its own list, nicely illustrated with a slide show and story offering tips for alternative experiences. Skip Times Square in favor of Central Park’s Strawberry Fields, writer Chris Colin recommends, or try the Valley of the Kings instead of the Pyramids at Giza.

The list of tourist traps includes perennial offenders like downtown Cancun (“mother ship to all spring break clichés, unfunny T-shirts and expensive, watery booze”) and the Hollywood Walk of Fame (“There’s a time in everyone’s life when the Hollywood Walk of Fame holds great appeal. It’s around the time that treehouses and action figures do, too”). But I’d have to argue a few of their other picks, including the Forbidden City. When I visited in 2002, I found it breathtaking, Starbucks notwithstanding.

I’d sooner nominate the Great Wall’s Badaling site, which features a bear pit and a go-cart-on-rails that ferries tourists to the top. The experience left me that much more determined to find an isolated spot on the Wall next time around.

Photo by Stig Nygaard via Flickr, (Creative Commons).