Tourist Traps

Q – What are the tourist traps in UK?

Just like positivity of a place, there are some downfalls. The same rule is applicable to the UK. Even though it is a nice place with perfect scenic beauty, enveloping this area, there are some tourist traps, which you should avoid for enjoying the moments completely.

A – Some tourist traps that you should avoid in UK are mentioned below-

  •  Parking: Unfortunately, the cost of short stay parking is quite ludicrous. You might be a little bit surprised to know, but in certain places, like in Deansgate, you will be charged nearly £8.50 for parking for an hour! You can avoid it by traveling through Metrolink or bus routes.and also if you have parked on the wrong parking line they will fine you around £500 and if you did not pay on time they will toe it away,please be careful.


  •  ATM Cash Points: Well, similarly the ATM cash point charges are just too much for the travelers to handle. You will never know when you will be charged with such a hefty amount of money, for using a mere ATM,when you use the ATM in UK, always find out about the charges from your bank before your travel because some bank ATMs dont charge more than it should be, some they do.


  •  Hotel Extra Charges: Hotel charges are ok, but in some cases, you might face the problem of paying extra charges. You will never know when you will be charged extra pennies for using Wi-Fi or phone calls, before you use them find out from the hotel receptionist. 


  • Another tourist trap: it is paying tips in restaurants, even when you are paying service tax separately! What is the point of that extra tip then? Well, no one knows, and no one cares to bother, some resaurants trick the tourists, please be careful.


  • At the money exchange (bureau de changes): most of the tourists get trapped by getting the low rates on their money,dont be trapped for these eg. if you are in paddington or bayswater or kingscross in london you will find many of them next to each other, please try atleast three places and come to a decision to change your currency.


  • Car rentals: well you always hire the car but when you hand over please be vigilant about it, when you accept the car check all the damages outside the car and always get the cars from the recommended companies.



• The Sherlock Holmes Museum, Marylebone-

A home of a fictional character, prop up some shabby mannequins, and then charge people to see it. That’s the scheme and it has worked for years, so much so there’s often a line. Tourists are not the most intuitive detectives: Do we really have to tell them that Sherlock Holmes didn’t actually exist and all of this is not real.

• The Prime Meridian at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich

the Prime Meridian, an imaginary line located at precisely 0 degrees longitude, crosses through the grounds of the Royal Observatory. Every day, interminable queues of coach tourists pay at least £7 to literally wait an hour in the Meridian Courtyard for their silly Instagram moment of straddling the line and setting a foot in two hemispheres at once. The dirty secret is they could save the time and cash because the line continues in a free area north of the terrace, and there’s never a line there.

• The London Dungeon, South Bank

Avoid it like the plague. This a sophomoric gross-out with locations in 7 other cities sops up overflow from the London Eye. Costumed actors bray at visitors as they lead them through darkness from set to set, each representing another period of English history as a 13-year-old boy might define them. Plague-ridden rubber corpses “sneeze” on passersby, a whore exposes one of Jack the Ripper’s mutilated victims, and cutthroat barber Sweeney Todd gleefully commands you to sit in his chair. The climax is a pair of indoor carnival rides. If you dread being picked on by bad stand-up comics, you’re going to hate this place. Yet there's always a line.

• Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Like foot fungus, the worthless rip has spread wherever people keep low standards. Now it's London. Its halls of oddities (sample: a portrait of Diana made from lint) and grotesque figures are useless and not worthwhile even for the kitsch value. This is the definition of a tourist trap. And it costs more than Westminster Abbey!


• The Clink Museum, Southward

Ostensibly themed to a long-gone prison, it exists mostly to exploit a touristy obsession with torture. Signs are poorly written and the museum lapses into amateurish, filthy displays of dummies being throttled by random devices. The TV show Most Haunted Live.

• THE BAKELITE MUSEUM WILLITON, SOMERSET

If you like your thermoset phenol formaldehyde resin formed from an elimination reaction of phenol with formaldehyde, then you’ll love the Bakelite Museum. Set deep in the peaceful Somerset countryside, the Bakelite Museum features everything you have always wanted to know about electrically non-conductive.

• CUMBERLAND PENCIL MUSEUM, KESWICK

As any parent knows, teenagers are obsessed with pencils. They can’t get enough of the things. What don’t they like? An internet connection and a lack of parental supervision. What do they like? Pencils. The Cumberland Pencil Museum’s greatest attraction is, undoubtedly, the World’s Longest Pencil coming in at 26 feet. But the Big Pencil is so useless you can’t even write with it, unless you have an equally enormous piece of paper and giant hands. And even then it would be rubbish because you still have to find an utterly massive desk to keep it in.


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