USA Today, an American daily newspaper, recently released an article listing the top 100 biggest tourist traps worldwide and to our horror, Malaysia, more specifically Penang Hill, found itself on the list.
So, how exactly did Penang Hill end up on the list?
According to USA today, the publication analysed 23.2 million Google reviews of the 500 most popular tourist attractions in the world, spanning 65 countries in six continents.
This was followed by the question, how frequently do the reviews mention the terms “tourist trap,” “overrated” or “expensive”?
The attractions are then compared to one another by measuring the relative frequency of these mentions, dividing the number of mentions in each case by the total number of reviews for that attraction. Now, that’s a lot of Math!
USA Today ranked Penang Hill in Malaysia as not only the worst tourist trap in Asia, but as well as 9th in the world.
It doesn’t stop there. The publication also listed Penang Hill as the 64th most overpriced attraction and the 14th most overrated attraction in the world.
But, based on the numbers, Penang Hill was named Asia’s worst tourist trap based on just 21 mentions of the keyword “tourist trap” from an overall 3,737 Google reviews.
What do you think? Is Penang Hill really a tourist trap? Let us know in the comments.
