You can’t beat a good old TripAdvisor review.
In fact, I wouldn’t book a restaurant, hotel or excursion without having a little nosy at people’s reviews first.
But no matter how amazing an attraction is, you’re never going to please everyone, which means you’re always going to have to sift through the odd negative review, no matter what you’re searching for.
If you’re from the UK, or have even visited the UK, you might have considered taking a trip to Snowdon, the tallest mountain in Wales. The snowy attraction draws in more than 582,000 walkers every year, so it would make sense that some of those thousands of people would go home to document their experiences on TripAdvisor, to let others know what they might be letting themselves in for.
Granted, at an elevation of 1,085 meters above sea level, taking a trip up the steep summit certainly isn’t for everyone.
In fact, one visitor was mightily disgruntled with the ‘abysmal’ wheelchair access at the 3,560ft peak. Strange, that.
Meanwhile, Steven from Leicester also took to TripAdvisor to blast the cold weather conditions, while warning others of what he described as ‘the most terrifying’ experience of his life.
He wrote:
We spent weeks researching the best route path to take being we were novice climbers, we spent weeks walking up hills in prep for it, we watched you tube videos of people doing the chosen path, The Ranger Path, and all I can say is don’t do it.
It was the most terrifying experience of our lives.
The path is relentless, starts straight away going up hill and never lets up, the higher you go the worse the terrain becomes, you clamber over rocks, steps, jagged rocks and you can’t walk more than 20 yards without stopping.
The novice climber went on to complain about the weather conditions, which started out ‘really sunny’, but by the time they were a quarter of the way up, it ‘lashed it down, it hailed and there was a wind of around at a guess 40mh’.
Steven continued:
We seriously did not think we would get of alive [sic].
Having pushed ourselves up there we were physically and mentally exhausted, soaked through to the skin and beyond.
After his ‘terrifying’ ordeal, Steven decided to attempt the Llanberis route down, but he wasn’t too pleased with that, either.
He said:
The info on the website states an easy climb and decent…absolutely garbage, unless you are an experienced mountaineer.
The rain wind and hail never let up for the entire time, we saw nothing but fog fog fog.
I seriously did not think we would get down alive!
On top of it all, Steven had to pay £30 for a taxi to drive him back to his car, which he had parked at the bottom of The Rangers Path.
A second disgruntled visitor criticised the lack of wheelchair access around the mountain, writing:
I visited mount Snowdon hoping to achieve my dream of reaching the top, unfortunately this was not meant to be.
I was disgusted to find even the easiest route up the mountain was not wheelchair accessible!
I took the train up for a ridiculous £22 only to find that service had stopped when I tried to descend!
I started to carefully wheel down the mountain only to get stuck at the first hurdle on a big rock.
The café has also been criticised for being ‘too busy’ at peak times.
Fortunately, there’s just 12 terrible reviews and a staggering 2,068 excellent reviews at the time of writing, so we’ll let you make your own mind up on that one.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.