Here's One More Reason You Never Want to Go to North Korea

North Korea has its problem.

A startling tendency to dispatch political leaders with extreme prejudice.

The equally problematic habit of indefinitely detaining tourists and/or sending them to work camps.

This is all true, no matter how much some travel vloggers might enjoy the country’s water slides.

As the video above suggests, though, the country does have a nascent tourism industry. And it has a six-star hotel. That hotel, according to TripAdvisor, is terrible, and the reviews for it rival any level of breast-beating exhibited in the most epic of Greek tragedies.

Example: “I had a slew of prostitutes and vagrants at my door.”

Example: “Staff were very rude and tried to get me to promote their little fat ruler with the dodgy haircut Kim Jong Un, and because I refused they threatened to have me arrested!”

Another, because it’s fun reading about other people’s horrible hotel stays: “Horrible place, but I guess still on the upper side of NK hospitality. Beds are wooden plates with a cushion on it.”

One more: “So awful. And so much brain-washing.”

Moral of story: Avoid North Korea, six-star hotel or not.

Meet your guide

Diane Rommel

Diane Rommel has written for The Wall Street Journal, Outside, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Travel + Leisure, Wallpaper and Afar, as well as The Cut, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and McSweeney’s. She once drove from London to Mongolia, via Siberia.