Bad press for the Eiffel Tower! A study of online comments left by travelers from all over the world reveals that it is the attraction with the most tourist scams!
A study of destinations that attract scams
A cab ride paid for at triple the usual rate, a guided tour of a local craft workshop that turns into forced shopping in a shopping mall, or a stolen passport? Unfortunately, scams and thefts sometimes infiltrate our vacations.
A company specializing in luggage storage has compiled and analyzed the comments left on the TripAdvisor platform by thousands of world travelers after their visit to a tourist destination. Bounce’s objective was to identify the attractions and cities where visitors were most likely to be ripped off! The company tracked down reviews mentioning scams, and identified the sites (cities, attractions, monuments, museums…) where they were most concentrated.
Which places have had the misfortune to make it into this inglorious ranking?
A Parisian monument tops the list of scams
According to Bounce, which took into account the percentage of comments mentioning scams out of the total number of reviews left on an attraction, we find the fortified Intramuros district in Manila (Philippines) in 1st position, followed by Beijing’s Forbidden City (China) and Petra (Jordan). The top 10 also includes Pompeii, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, Times Square, the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, Ha Long Bay in Vietnam and the Eiffel Tower!
Bag and cell phone theft, fortune-telling, fake guided tours… The famous monument and its surroundings are even said to be the site in the world with the highest absolute number of scams suffered by tourists. 548 reviews mentioned an incident of this kind out of more than 143,000 left by visitors.
The study also looks at cities as a whole, and Paris unsurprisingly slips into fourth place, behind Riga (Latvia) at number one, then Istanbul (Turkey) and Budapest (Hungary).
More on the Bounce study