Not quite as well-known as South of the Border, there is also Florida Citrus Center. The particular one that link goes to is near St. Augustine, but there are a ton of them all over the state. If you drive into Florida, either on I-95 or I-75, you’ll see their billboards everywhere. They advertise fresh oranges and (usually) live alligators.
On one trip I finally decided that we just had to stop in. They’re basically just big convenience stores attached to a gas station. The live alligators are babies in a little aquarium. They’ve got a bunch of cheap merchandise, and often discount Disney or Universal t-shirts. Would not recommend, although on some level it’s kind of comforting to see the billboards. It reminds me of road trips of the past.
I don’t know about that… crap vendors are everywhere, regardless of how solemn or interesting the actual tourist venue may be. Doesn’t necessarily make it a tourist trap.
IMO what makes something a tourist trap is when the actual attraction is inconsequential or lackluster, and it’s been hyped up to the point where it mostly serves as a sort of touristic honeypot to draw them in and sell them crap.
As much as it pains me to say it as a Texan, the Alamo is a prime example of this. It’s a little, mostly reconstructed Spanish mission in the heart of downtown San Antonio that was the site of a famous battle in 1836. But little of that is really evident, considering the location in the midst of downtown San Antonio, and the amount of imagination it takes to visualize what it must have been like back then.
Yet people go to San Antonio in droves to see it, and the whole area around it is a massive tourist area- there’s a Legoland, a shopping mall across the street, a Ripley’s Believe it or Not, the Riverwalk is prominent nearby, hotels, wax museums, and dozens of bars and restaurants of all kinds dot the cityscape for blocks around.
That’s my yardstick for whether or not something is a tourist trap- I compare it to the Alamo and see how it stacks up.
To me the phrase “tourist trap” implies that there is no other reason to be in the vicinity than the trap. Someplace like Wall Drug or Reptile Gardens, for example. The Alamo wouldn’t count to me because there is the rest of San Antonio to see/eat/experience.
Umm, Reptile Gardens is just a few miles from a certain popular patriotic mountain carving, and Wall Drug is at the exit for an awful, nay bad, landscape national park. But I’d still classify them as tourist traps, based on all of the billboards hyping them for hundreds of miles. You do have to spend money to visit Reptile Gardens, but for some families feel it’s worth it (we liked it). Wall Drug is free to walk through; we rarely buy anything there when we visit.
Good advice. When we had a stop in Aruba we eschewed the beaches and got a daily bus pass. The bus went south to the lighthouse, past the hotels, but then we got on it the other way (and asked if we really wanted to do that) which went north through the places real people lived.
Far more interesting than ocean and sand. Grocery stores used by the locals are also fascinating.
I didnt read all the posts yet, but i was thinking of the pyramids of egypt, are they free to visit or is it some monetary limits there also? And the sphinx
But with lots of tourist traps, like Niagara Falls, you can see the attraction for free, but there are plenty of spending opportunities in the area (gift shops, restaurants, paid tours like the Maid of the Mist boat rides, things like Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, etc.)
Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines. Say you’re driving cross country, and you’re starting to feel the need to take a break - get some food, use a bathroom, etc. You’re ready to take the next off ramp, when you see a sign, “World’s Largest Ball of Twine! Free admittance!” It’s another two exits down, so you figure, why not? And wait a bit to take that exit. And there’s the ball of twine, and it’s lame, but like the sign says, it’s free.
But everything else at that exit costs twice as much as it does at the exits on either side of it. That’s the “trap” part.
I wouldn’t consider Niagara Falls a tourist trap - I think of tourist traps as being the places no one sets out to see , like the Worlds Largest Ball of Twine or Wall Drug ( which started out offering ice water to people on their way to a tourist attraction). People might make a point of stopping at those places when they are in the area but no one plans their vacation around a trip to Wall Drug
Darwin Minnesota isn’t close to any freeways, so you need to drive purposely to find it (it’s on US 12). We were on that highway, driving across Minnesota to a family event, when I saw that Darwin was the next town. I told my wife that we MUST stop, but when we turned into the town, they were just about to start the Twine Ball Day parade. It was a hoot! The highlight was the town kids rolling smaller balls of twine down the street. The ball of twine really isn’t much to look at, but you could cross if it off your bucket list if you stop to see it.
A tourist trap? It’s free, just costs some time and effort, which makes it a trap of a sort. After 90 seconds, you can leave without spending any money (unless you want a tee-shirt).
About 20 some odd years ago my cousin and I planned a Summer Road Trip that left from Northern Washington through Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Oregon. It was a pilgrimage to the Cabela’s in Sidney, Nebraska (Don’t ask.) We made it a point to map out and stop at every single Roadside Attraction we could on the trip, from monuments of American Supremacy like Carhenge and Geronimo to the kitschy and stupid, like Mount Rushmore and Reptile Gardens. Wall Drug was a “Must See” on the trip.
We weren’t that stupid. We tanked well before Wall Drug. That was a lunch break. So no idea what the markup was on anything. We ate at a cafe somewhere in the place. IIRC prices weren’t out of line too much.
I agree that Venice (which I’ve visited several times) is heavily geared towards tourism, and that real-life Venetians who have nothing to do with tourism and simply happen to live their lives there are become increasingly rare. I also agree that this gives the city a strongly un-authentic feel. But it’s still not only tourism. For instance, it’s a regional capital (roughly analogous to an American state capital) and so has a fair amount of public administration going on there. It also has a fair amount of manufacturing, shipbuilding and port industry. Those are concentrated in neighbourhoods on the mainland which are not part of the historic core in the Lagoon, but administratively they belong to the city of Venice.
If we take a strong economic reliance on tourism as a criterion for considering a city a tourist trap, then Ie would say the biggest tourist trap on this planet would be Las Vegas.