Picture your dream beach. It’s probably a powder-white stretch of sand with azure water, empty of any other people with not one bit of litter in sight. No one wants to turn up to the seaside to find that it’s hectic, loud, scattered with people’s rubbish and a bit smelly.
To help you avoid disappointment this summer, software service Cloudward has dug into TripAdvisor reviews to find out which beaches in the world are the biggest let downs. Out of the 200 most popular beaches on the site, Bournemouth Beach was named the fifth most disappointing.
Cloudward came to that conclusion by filtering online reviews for the frequency of complaint-related words like ‘dirty’, ‘overcrowded’, ‘long queues’, ‘noise’ and ‘disruption’. It found that 52.5 percent of Bournemouth’s reviews mentioned the word ‘crowded’, 31.7 percent included the word ‘dirty’, 10.2 percent included ‘queues’ and 5.6 percent included the word ‘noise’.
The problem may be that people arrive to Bournemouth Beach with too high expectations. While it may be one of TripAdvisor’s most complained about beaches, the very same sandy stretch also recently ranked 12th in the world on the site’s list of its top-rated beaches of all time.
There are a lot of mixed reviews for the beach on the site. One TripAdvisor review from earlier this month called it ‘an absolutely amazing place to swim’ but another, posted the day before, said that ‘the beautiful beach is now so grossly overcrowded on a nice day that it’s unpleasant’.
Earlier in the summer, one person said the beach was ‘rubbish strewn’ but another said ‘the beach is very clean and has great facilities such as showers, refill water stations, bathrooms, change facilities and plenty of shops’. Looks like the quality of a visitor’s Bournemouth Beach experience may simply depend on the day.
For a beach day that’s guaranteed to tick all your boxes, choose from Time Out’s list of the UK’s best beaches. And if you like to stick to bays that are more off the beaten track, we’ve got a list of those too.
ICYMI: The stunning island that is one of the quietest places to visit in the UK.
Plus: The best seaside view in Britain.
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