I lived in San Diego for 18 years and wholeheartedly agree. It’s a dull, characterless place. People are shocked when they find out I left SD FOR New Jersey - folks who go on vacation there see it as paradise and not the vapid, traffic-choked, $600k for a shitty two-bedroom ranch house place it is. I prefer NJ, warts and all.
My other vote is a tie between Sacramento and San Bernardino.
If the OP hadn’t stipulated no business trips, that’s what I’d intended to say. I can’t think of a more boring or sterile place I’ve ever been.
Ok, now I’m intrigued. I have been wanting to get to Asia and all my research suggests Hong Kong and Singapore as good places. I’m not going there as a political activist even though there are certainly things I disagree with. The YouTube videos I’ve seen make Singapore look appealing. I’m well aware it’s not Amsterdam and I need to mind my p’s and q’s.
I arrived in Jakarta at night on a ship from Sumatra and took the first train I could get out the following afternoon for Jogja. What a hellhole Jakarta was even back in 1976.
The southern coast (via the Garden State Parkway), esp the far south (Cape May), is pretty awesome, as is the far north and all the mountains, Delaware River included.
Asia? Yes! Hong Kong and Singapore not so much.
Japan, Thailand, Burma and the Philippines are great places to visit, but India has them all beat.
Hate to bad mouth Hong Kong too much. I lived there for awhile. Not much to see, but the women are some of the most beautiful in the world.
When were you there? That city has changed a lot over the past few decades.
Nikko, Japan.
Before arriving in Japan, I had heard so much about Nikko. And its not a terrible place to visit. Its just that compared to other places like Hiraiazumi, Takayama, Kanazawa, the Kiso Valley and many other place to numerous to name, its not special at all.
Nikko has one important thing going for it and that is the fact that it is easily accessible from Tokyo. For this reason, many people visit (both locals and tourists visiting the country only for a short time). This causes a lot of buzz and this is why I believe that Nikko is so famous.
Venice is a tourist economy. It isn’t a tourist trap, because it honestly is what it purports to be and the depth of history there isn’t a lie, but… once you get to Europe, history isn’t exactly hard to find. Medieval and Early Modern history isn’t hard to find. Great museums with interesting exhibits in both art and history aren’t hard to find. Venice has all of those in a city which is, at this point, tailor-made for taking tourist money and practically nothing else. You have to be constantly on your guard against pickpockets in a way I didn’t experience in, say, Vienna, or Nuremberg, cities with actual economies beyond tourism which also have history and museums and culture.
Similarly, Las Vegas is also what it purports to be, and I have very little use for it: I don’t gamble, I don’t drink, and I don’t hire prostitutes, so that leaves a few of the shows and very little else. Plus, Las Vegas is awash in fucking cigarette smoke. It’s like stepping back in time twenty-plus years.
My employer sent me to several computer conferences.
LA was the most disappointing. We were downtown in the Biltmore. Not an area any of us wandered around sight seeing. We pretty much stayed inside the entire 5 days.
The hotel showed much of it’s old grandeur. But, it was showing it’s age too.
By contrast, the most fantastic city was New Orleans. We were right on the river plaza. Gorgeous views from my room window. There was a huge mall underneath the hotel. Elevator dropped us right into the middle of it. Had a great time on Bourbon street and other sights.
Hong Kong is okay if you can get away from the city, there’s more lovely countryside than folks might expect. But yeah.
And of all the Asian cities I’ve been to, I’d put Bangkok way at the top. I loved Mumbai as well, but was only there two days.
My sister has lived there for most of her adult life. She absolutely loves it. I’ve visited her twice and was more than ready to leave after a few days. The thing I remember about it, both times, was that there was a restaurant on pretty much every block but I couldn’t find a grocery store to save my life!
My least favorite tourist destination was a popular one in the Midwest - Okoboji, a lake and resort town in northern Iowa. One year when I was in college, the annual pharmacy convention was held there, and several of my friends and I went because the food, lodging, and attendance at the convention were free. You’d think July in a resort town would be fun? No, it wasn’t. I don’t think the temperature topped 60 degrees the whole time we were there, and 8 students were assigned to each 2-bedroom condo, and each condo had just two keys. 
Yeah, we were sleeping on the floor, the couch, etc. One of my roommates, who was a couple years ahead of me in school, turned out to be a really bad alcoholic on top of it; I had guessed she was about 40 years old, but she wasn’t - she was in her late 20s.
We all left early and drove the 5 hours back home. My friend that I drove with used that trip to visit a few relatives who lived in the area.
I do need to mention the Universial Tour in LA. The conference organized a tour and shuttle buses. We arrived late but the staff were very, very gracious and made sure we had a wonderful time. We visited the Star Trek set and several of my coworkers sat on the bridge and did a scene. We still have a video shot by the Tour. Fun to pull out at office parties.
Those couple hours were the highlight of the LA conference. Otherwise it was a long week in the Biltmore.
We were in LA in 91, the year before the Riots. Very close to the Biltmore but I heard it wasn’t damaged.
Manila. Sterile shopping malls scattered across a featureless plain with shantytowns in between. Even a walk through Intramuros didn’t impress me. Overcrowded inadequate metro, rude people. I think I liked Jakarta better, though it was the only place I ever checked in—at two different “hotels”—to find the room offered neither top sheets nor toilet paper. Apparently they were more like dormitories.
No question: Ireland. I don’t need to go back.
I liked Khartoum, Sudan better than anywhere in Ireland.
Tulsa has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I was there before the fracking earthquakes, but it was humid, there was nothing to do, and those gigantic hands in front of Oral Roberts University will haunt my nightmares forever (I was driving through trying to find something, anything, of interest).
The stretch of Florida between Sarasota and Fort Myers. It looked like someone had build a 10 mile stretch of road side, and just repeated is over and over. And all of it could have been transplanted from other parts of the US. Basically nothing original or interesting.
Eloy, Arizona.
Not that you’re in much danger of going there.
I mostly live in Jakarta*, and while it is a great place to live (or was - the traffic is getting the point where it is unmanageable even for a traffic-tolerant type like me) it is a TERRIBLE place to visit as a tourist.
There are great places to buy textiles and handicrafts in Jakarta, but the prices are getting pretty nuts, and it takes so long to get anywhere that you can blow an entire day just getting to and from a good store.
*For about 6 weeks more, than I switch from spending most of my time in Jakarta and a little in Hawaii to the reverse. Yay.
Nthing Jakarta; I’d enjoyed Malaysia, including KL, and thought it’d be fairly similar, but nope. Spent a few days there getting over jetlag. Couldn’t walk anywhere without being pestered by taxi drivers- literally every few metres, and I normally enjoy walking round new cities with a map and not much of a plan. There was no charm to the place though, and I really couldn’t find much interesting to do. And the litter…
The taxi drivers and litter were as bad or worse in other bits of Java as well, but at least there were some plus points to the other places I visited.