“We bought ‘Ray-Ban’ sunglasses for five euros (£3.50) from a street trader, only to find out they were fake.”
- “We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels.”
- “On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don’t like spicy food at all.”
- It’s lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during ’siesta’ time – this should be banned.”
- “I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts.”
- “I was bitten by a mosquito – no-one said they could bite.”
- “We had to queue outside with no air conditioning.”
- “We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white.”
- A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.
- “The beach was too sandy.”
- A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she’d been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the “do not disturb” sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.
- “There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners.”
- “The brochure stated: ‘No hairdressers at the accommodation’. We’re trainee hairdressers – will we be OK staying here?”
- “My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked.”
- “Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women.”
- “It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home.”
- “No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled.”
- A guide at Windsor Castle was struggling to make herself heard over the roar of low flying aircraft coming into land at nearby Heathrow. She was interrupted by a tourist who demanded what was wrong with the town planners, and why had they built the castle so close to the airport.
- The highlight of a cruise liner's visit to the Alaskan port of Valdez was a guided tour of the southern end of the great 800 mile pipeline through which, the guide informed them, some 1.3 million barrels of oil came daily from Prudoe Bay in the north. When he asked if there were any questions, someone solemnly enquired, `How do they get all those empty barrels back up to Prudoe Bay?'
- A group of tourists escorted around the British Houses of Parliament suddenly found themselves in the presence of the then Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, resplendent in full wig and gown. Spying behind the group the figure of Neil Marten MP, the Lord Chancellor called out in greeting.`Neil' with dignified vigour. And all the tourists did.
- A tourist, on a driving holiday in Britain was reported to have been overcome by the Cotswolds but astonished at the number of villages with the same name. `After Chipping Sodbury,' he said, `there were three villages in a row called Loose Chippings.'
- The 1982 Association of British Travel Agents conference in Phoenix, Arizona, had to change its venue at the last moment when it discovered that its original hotel had been double booked.
