The 7 Destinations That Sound Like Tourist Traps But Actually Aren't
Travel-blog convention says: skip Times Square, skip Pisa, skip the Eiffel Tower. The crowds are awful, the photos are clichés, the experience is overrated.
Some of that's true. Some of it's a kind of inverse snobbery that misses the actual quality of a place. Here are seven destinations that get the 'tourist trap' treatment but that we keep going back to anyway, and why.
1. The Eiffel Tower at sunset
Yes it's crowded. Yes there's a Hard Rock Café across the street. None of that matters when you're standing in Champ de Mars at 7:45pm in May with the gold late light hitting the iron and the tower starting its nightly sparkle show. Some experiences earned their cliché. Skip the elevator line, bring a picnic, sit on the grass. It's still magic.
2. The Grand Canyon South Rim
Yes there's a parking lot. Yes there's an IMAX. Yes the crowds at Mather Point are absurd in summer. Walk a quarter-mile in either direction along the Rim Trail and you're alone. The canyon does not stop being spectacular because someone built a Visitor Center near it.
3. The Colosseum
Buy the early-morning ticket — 8:30am entry — and you have it largely to yourself. The afternoon crowds are real and miserable. The early ticket is $5 more and worth ten times that.
4. Times Square at 3am
Hear us out. Times Square in the daytime is genuinely awful: a Spider-Man assaults you for tip money, the costumes are filthy, the chain restaurants charge $28 for a burger. But Times Square at 3am — and we mean genuinely empty — is one of the most surreal urban experiences in the world. The lights are still on. The street is empty. It feels like the world's biggest empty stage. Walk down 7th Ave at 3am once. You'll see what we mean.
5. Niagara Falls (the Canadian side)
The American side is a casino-and-strip-mall disaster. The Canadian side is a beautifully manicured park with the falls on full display. It's been a tourist destination since 1820. It's still the falls. Don't dismiss it because the marketing is dated.
6. The Hollywood Walk of Fame
Genuinely awful most of the time. But: Hollywood Forever Cemetery is two miles south, one of the most fascinating places in LA. The Magic Castle (members-only, find a member) is across the street. The actual Hollywood sign hike is 90 minutes from the Walk. The Walk itself is bad but the neighborhood around it has gold within walking distance.
7. Las Vegas, but only the older Strip
New Vegas (south Strip, Cosmopolitan and below) is genuinely a tourist trap. Old Vegas (Fremont Street, downtown) is one of the strangest, most genuinely weird American urban experiences. The Atomic Liquors bar opened in 1952. The Golden Gate has been continuously operating since 1906. Skip the south Strip and spend a night downtown — completely different city.
What 'tourist trap' actually means
A tourist trap, in our usage, is a place where the marketing has eaten the experience. The 'experience' is now a Disneyfied version of the original thing. Times Square daytime is a tourist trap. Times Square at 3am is the original thing.
The seven places above all share one feature: the original thing is still there underneath the noise. You just have to time it right or step half a block away from the obvious approach. The blogs that say 'skip these' are right that the default approach to them is bad. They're wrong that the places themselves don't earn the visit.
How we time anti-tourist-trap visits
Three rules. (1) Go early — 90% of tourist crowds form between 10am and 4pm. (2) Go off-season — same place in November is a different place. (3) Walk one block away from where the bus stops. The 'authentic' version is almost always within a 5-minute walk of the over-marketed version.
Apply those three rules and most tourist traps become genuinely worth your time.
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