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Valentine's Day 2019: 10 people reveal their worst romantic holidays ever

From getting ill to being cheated on, Cupid definitely skipped out on these 'romantic' breaks

Thursday 14 February 2019 11:39 GMT
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Flowers may not always do the trick.
Flowers may not always do the trick.

It’s Valentine’s Day. That means reliving all your worst romantic holiday disasters and praying they never happen again. Feeling bad about yours? Here are 10 of our worst*.

The dicky tummy

On my first holiday with my boyfriend, we went to Morocco and spent half the week in a riad in Marrakech and the other in a five-star hotel in Essaouira.

One of the last days we spent the by the pool, drinking cocktails. Usually, I’m on the ball with ice, but I stupidly thought “it’s a five star”. It wasn’t until we’d gone for dinner that evening (a 15-minute taxi ride away) that I realised I was very, very ill.

The single toilet of the restaurant was downstairs and it opened straight onto the rest of the diners. Out of sheer British embarrassment, I attempted to eat some of my duck. I barely managed a thing off my plate and the owner aggressively quizzed me on what could possibly be wrong with their fantastic food; I could only mumble through pursed lips that I wasn’t feeling very well.

Thinking I couldn’t make the taxi ride back, instead I ran around the other restaurants trying to find hope – either there was a very long and awkward wait, no toilet roll or the worst toilet I had ever seen. I decided getting a taxi back to the hotel was my best bet. But I wasn’t safe yet. The hotel room had no proper bathroom – just a bath behind the bed, a shower with no door behind that, and, next to it, a toilet with a thin piece of frosted glass that didn’t even meet the wall.

Utter humiliation unfolded for the rest of the evening and most of the next day. I called room service for ginger tea and toilet roll; they sent a ginger cocktail with more ice and no supplies. In the end my boyfriend had to resort to stealing toilet roll from the hotel restaurant for me.

On the plus side, we’ve now been together two years and counting.

The Tinderella playah

We’d planned the ultimate beach holiday. As we’d both been away working in different countries for the few months before, we picked somewhere romantic, off the beaten track and low-key to fit with the plan of doing nothing at all for a week. All we needed was the beach, some strong cocktails and each other.

A romantic snap could end up as someone's Tinder profile (Getty Images)

It was perfect. We spent the days in our little thatched hut, right on the beach, lazing around and catching up. Being utterly loved up, we of course snapped loads of photos as a memento of the trip.

Fast forward a few months and it turns out those pictures became a lot more than just a memento. After a tip off from a pal, there it was. A screengrab of her Tinder profile, complete with the picture I’d taken of her, beaming, as we relaxed on the balcony of our hut. We already had another romantic break planned; needless to say, I decided to give it a miss.

Dumped mid-trip

I was dumped one week into a two-week holiday on the island of Kos, which was fairly disastrous. Everything had seemed fine, but I noticed he was being odd with his mobile phone and then odd with me, too, so I said, “I think you’ve gone off me”. He replied, “I can’t lie, I have, but I didn’t want to ruin your holiday.” We decided to leave immediately – together. Cue an awkward 36-hour journey home via Athens and Manchester to pick up the car in Bristol.

The broken make-or-break

My wife and I had a trip planned to California after Christmas to escape the cold. We’d planned ahead: a few nights in San Francisco, drive down Highway 1, through Los Angeles and to Las Vegas just in time for New Year’s.

At the airport, she realised her iPhone was at home. In a panic she threatened to go home to get it, which would mean missing the flight. I didn’t understand why it was so critical, but we called a friend who posted it to the hotel in San Francisco. She was distracted during our first day and ecstatic when the phone arrived. She didn’t seem interested in doing much that evening, so I went for a walk. I returned to our room to find her asleep, phone in hand. I thought I should charge it for her, but as I pulled it out of her hand, I saw she was mid-text to an anonymous phone number, professing her love and saying she wished they could be together.

The drive down Highway 1 was nauseating. Emily was on her phone, seemed distant and wasn’t invested at all in the drive. One evening she excused herself for a walk. When she got back and went to sleep, I decided I wanted to see what she did on her phone while she was out. In a moment I’m not proud of, I looked at her texts and calls and figured out that she’d spent the hour talking to her boss. That’s who she was texting, too.

When we got to Las Vegas, I brought it up, and the truth came out. She had cheated, she was sorry, she didn’t know what to do. I was devastated. We talked about how to move on. She said she wanted to be with me, so I decided to try.

Fast forward six months to our fifth anniversary. Things weren’t any better in the relationship. We were fighting on a regular basis, and she was still texting and calling her boss. Through it all we managed to plan an anniversary beach holiday,

When we landed, one of her bags didn’t arrive, so she was stressed. Me being frustrated by her texting her boss didn’t help. We fought throughout the trip. We cried, we yelled. We spent thousands on the ultimate beach vacation, only to be miserable the whole time. The only time things seemed OK was in Facebook and Instagram posts. It’s amazing the lie you can put on for social media.

A few weeks after we got back, we decided it was best to separate. If we couldn’t even get along for a couple of days on the beach with no obligations or responsibilities, how were we going to move forward and get along in the real world?

The holiday wasn’t the reason our trip was a disaster, but it definitely was a disaster.

Dicky tummy #2

Disastrous romantic holidays? Try a week’s birthday break in a five-star luxury suite in Agadir. The plan had been to have a romantic getaway in November for my husband’s birthday. Strolling the beach, romantic dinners and all that. But by day three both of us were hit by a stomach bug, and the rest of the holiday was spent in bed with the curtains closed – projectile vomiting and other bodily outflows decidedly killed the romance. Our only contact with the outside world was with housekeeping delivering more toilet paper. It wasn’t pretty – on the return flight we deliberately chose the last row to be near the toilet. I travel for work all the time, but this was the worst travel experience I ever had.

Puerta America's all-black room can put a dampener on romance

The ghost in the room

I’d been seriously ill and was still off work so my boyfriend had sweetly offered to take me to Spain for a week – me choosing where to go and stay, at his expense. I’m really into architecture so we had a lovely week bouncing from poshtel to design hotel – so lovely, in fact, that at one of them he’d suggested we get married. I’d said no – I wasn’t in the right space after my illness – but the holiday had continued and we’d had a really good time.

The hotel where we were staying the last night was the one I was most excited about – the Puerta America in Madrid, some of whose rooms are designed by Zaha Hadid. Obviously I’d suggested one of those, and thought an all-black rather than an all-white one would be more interesting. But I hadn’t realised just how depressing an all-black room – from the carpet to the bedframe to the furniture to the walls – would be. The only thing that wasn’t black was the bathroom, and that was a deranged orange.

It was a bit like the room in Blue Valentine in that the vibe was so bad that it encouraged us to say the worst things we’d ever thought. We had a blazing row, I ended up sleeping on the black plastic windowframe, we tentatively made up in the morning and flew home. Two days later, he called me to say that the past two years had been a terrible mistake and he never wanted to see me again. I blame the demon hotel room.

The leap of doom

My boyfriend took me snorkelling in Silfra in Iceland for our anniversary – it was supposed to be really romantic, beautiful water and all that. We chose wetsuits instead of drysuits so we could “move around” more and I ended up having a full-blown panic attack when I got in the water because it was freezing – actually painful. The poor guide had said, “Oh, dive, you’ll see so many beautiful things,” and I put my face in the water and thought it was going to fall off. She said, “You’ll be numb soon enough so then you’ll enjoy it.” What’s worse is that the park has really strict rules on what you can and can’t touch – you can’t go out the way you came, you have to make it around the entire network of manmade canals.

A couple's holiday can be ruined by a bad stomach

So there I was, freaking out in the water, scaring all the other tourists. Eventually we got to the end and we had to get out immediately and it was still so cold – about 3 degrees – and we were just stripping out of our wetsuits on the side of the road, screaming. We broke up on the flight on the way home.

Dicky tummy # 3

My boyfriend and I went on our first holiday as a couple in 2016. We enjoyed a romantic city break in Amsterdam, cycling along canals together, walking around the Rijksmuseum holding hands and standing on copious bridges sharing a smooch as the sun set. It was splendid. But on our last day, things weren’t quite right. All day my beloved complained of an upset stomach, necessitating frequent trips to the bathroom. I felt fine right up until we reached the airport, when I began to feel increasingly sick. As we were queuing up to board the plane, I had to run to the loo to throw up. I thought the worst was over, but after we’d taken our seats and the flight took off, I had to grab a sick bag. I proceeded to fill up three bags with my vomit during the 70-minute flight, while my boyfriend looked on with sympathy (it could have been disgust) in his eyes. The good news is that, having seen me at my very worst, he didn’t immediately dump me. Miraculously, we’re still together.

The dodgy date

Swiping on Tinder during a trip to Prague saw me match a woman with model looks and an engaging personality five minutes before my flight home.

We chatted and things fizzled. Then, one afternoon in the lounge of Nice airport, I was bored and decided to text her. What luck – she was going to be in London that weekend.

We took a boat along the Thames and ended up in a Greenwich jazz bar. It was romantic but she had to leave the next day. I had to see more of her, and she invited me back to her city; I booked an easyJet flight to Prague five days later, along with a fancy hotel and an even fancier restaurant.

But it wasn’t fancy enough, it seemed – “I know way more prestigious restaurants than the one you’ve booked, let’s leave and go there instead,” she sulked, one of a number of complaints within the first few hours of my arrival. I called a halt to it right there. I paid the pre-drinks tab and headed to my favourite Prague butchers, Naše maso, for a cheeseburger.

The ultimate rejection

I got dumped straight off the train at St Pancras after a “romantic” trip to Paris. I think I was too boring for her.

*All stories are real although anonymity has been guaranteed

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