The 5 Worst Travel Experiences

Last Updated on April 7, 2024 by Adam Watts

At Comedy Travel Writing we love to celebrate the times when travel isn’t the dream experience you pretend it is on social media. It ain’t all picturesque sunsets and trips of a lifetime, folks. So here are 5 of the worst travel experiences.

The Worst Part of… Sunsets

Sunsets can be beautiful, calming, and the perfect tonic to remedy the stresses of your everyday life. That’s what every Instagram caption of a sunset wants you to believe, anyway.

But let’s be real here. You’ll probably end up sitting at a beachfront bar, sipping a cocktail, wanting to take a perfect photo to brag about on social media, but the weather is pretty overcast. You might see a whimper of a sunset, hiding like a scared puppy behind a blanket of cloud.

I know personally I’ve definitely seen more terrible sunsets than I’ve seen great ones. But we often say to people back home that we went on vacation and idealize about that late afternoon sunset over the bay, when actually it was mediocre.

Then if it’s not bad enough, you suddenly start to see fat drops of rain splosh into your mojito.

Brilliant.

Sunsets can be amazing, absolutely. But they can also be an extremely disappointing travel experience.

The Worst Part of… Food

One of the worst travel experiences you can have is around food.

Ask anyone why they like to travel and a lot of them will say “unfamiliar new culinary delights are delectable to my palate”. Those people are idiots.

New foods upset stomachs. It’s a fact. Admittedly, some new foods are great, like these great foods from Peru, but what you don’t often hear about are the times that people get violently, aggressively sick from food they eat while on a trip.

If you follow a blog that posts consistent daily journal updates from their 3-week trip to Vietnam and they wax lyrical about all the amazing food that they’re eating, but there’s a conspicuous day missing, chances are they spent that day puking their guts up all over their hotel room.

Whether from some street food that was prepared using unclean water, or undercooked meat, or something indeterminate, the consequences of an upset stomach can be debilitating. Despite what you want to believe, a lot of people and places don’t make good food. If you stumble across an alley and down that alley is a tiny noodle spot that looks like it’s basically the back of someone’s house, probably it’s just some random family who wants to make some extra cash from tourists. They’re not an undiscoverd master chef who deserves their own Netflix show.

And that’s only to speak of when things are really bad. What about times where you eat something new and you just don’t like it? That’s annoying. It’s not the worst travel experience, but it’s disappointing. Say you went to Morocco and had tagine made by a bedouin family in the desert and… it wasn’t very good, or at least you just didn’t like the flavours. That’s okay. Tomorrow you’ll get a hamburger.

The Worst Part of… Transport

One reason people love traveling is to break the monotony of everyday life. One reason people love traveling is to break the monotony of everyday life. One reason people love traveling is to break the monotony of everyday life.

Not doing a daily commute to an office is itself an enjoyable experience. But the alternative can make for some of the worst travel experiences.

In extreme cases, it’s really stressful, like when you have to cross an unexpected river in the Amazon Rainforest.

Sometimes it’s extremely boring, when you’re waiting for a bus at an abandoned gas station.

And more often than not, sometimes it’s just a pain figuring things out. These are all questions you’ll probably ask yourself in a new city:

• Where’s the subway?
• Can I use buses?
• How do I pay for buses?
• Should I do a daily pass, weekend pass, or buy individual rides?
• Should I get a pack of 6 single rides for the price of 5, where 3 of them can only be used between 7-9pm?
• Does Uber exist here?
• If I take a taxi will I get taken somewhere and murdered, or worse, be overcharged?

And airports, well, the less I say about airports the better.

Most of the time transport isn’t the worst travel experience, but it can be extremely stressful and time-consuming.

The Worst Part of… Accommodation

If your idea of a trip is an all-inclusive stay in a 7-star hotel in Dubai, look away now. But for the rest of us, accommodation can be one of the worst travel experiences.

Depending on your budget, personality, and desire for “authentic” experiences, your accommodation might include anything from a hostel dorm room, camping, staying with a local, a hotel, or an Airbnb. But with all of them, you’re going to miss a few things.

Hostels almost everywhere are wretched hives of scum and villainy. They’re dirty, smelly, cramped, and in a 10-person dorm room, chances are high you’ll get at least one violent snorer or a crew of partiers that come home drunk and noisy at 5am.

I have experienced one glorious hostel that had none of those things though. Read about Casa Verde hostel in Santa Ana, El Salvador here.

But even if you prefer a nice hotel room, they all have their quirks too. Maybe for some reason there’s no power outlet at your bedside table so you have to charge your phone across the room. Maybe there’s a weird stain on the ceiling that your brain runs amok with ideas of how it came to be.

Then there’s the things that even 7-star hotels can’t provide. The framed photos of you and your partner on past adventures as a reminder of previous amazing travel experiences. A bookshelf full of books you love. And the bed, of course the bed. Even the most luxurious king-size bed feels alien the first night.

Accommodation while traveling, however nice, can never be familiar, and unfamiliarity leads to discomfort, and discomfort leads to the worst travel experiences.

The Worst Parts of… Yourself

One of the worst parts of travel is that you get to know yourself, and whoever you’re with.

In a literal sense, by traveling you might be giving up six of your nine nightly lotions that make your skin glow like a Disney princess. You can handle that.

But in a deeper sense, by traveling you learn about yourself. At home your quirks and insecurities are buried under the safety net of routine. You’ll face them if and when you want to retrieve them from under the metaphorical rug of your life.

In another country, far across the world, it’s just you and yourself. And whoever you’re with. God help whoever you’re with. Here’s just a few of the worst things you might realize about yourself:

• You’re not as independent as you thought. You want someone to tell you what to do and where to go. You might wake up in your hostel bed paralyzed by the thought of, god forbid, meeting new people, eating new food, doing something new.
• You’re not as flexible and easy-going as you thought. Your online dating profile says, “I just go with the flow, man,” but when faced with a six-hour bus delay in the middle of Bolivia and your phone battery is dead and you left your charger in a hotel two cities ago, you lose your mind with anxiety.
• Your intuition sucks. Maybe you befriend someone in the hostel or at the hotel bar who seems like a good egg, and you go out with them for the evening for a quiet dinner, and before you know it it’s 4am and you’ve ingested a number of strange things and you’re in a sketchy part of the city and you’ve just vomited on your shoes — wait, where are my shoes??
• Your intuition sucks. Maybe you befriend someone in the hostel or at the hotel bar who seems like they’ll hook you up with strange substances and you’ll get wasted and have the best night of your life, but next thing you know it’s 10pm and you’ve had a nice risotto and two glasses of wine and you’re tucked up in bed for the night.
• You really hate the person you’re traveling with. Why do they always want to eat the most expensive food?! Why do they have an itinerary for every 30 minutes of our day and why can’t they be flexible ever? Can they just sleep past 7am for one day, WE ARE ON VACATION!

The Worst Travel Experiences

No matter which of these worst travel experiences you relate to, know that it’s okay to experience all of them, some of them, or even none of them (lucky you!). Even if you don’t want to post a photo of you puking into a toilet on your social media, celebrate that experience. It’s yours. Own it. You tried some new food; it was gross and made you sick, but you tried it!

You need the right mindset to travel. If you go into it wanting everything to be perfect, you’ll inevitably end up disappointed in some way or another. So get on that flight/train/boat/bus/pedalo and embrace the unexpected, the negative, the disappointment, and photoshop that sunset to make it look much better than it really was. I support you.