10 places on earth I don't want to visit again

Have you ever had to spend some time somewhere and really thought to yourself "remind me to never come back here again!"

This kind of place is usually referred to in the Irish vernacular as a "Kip". This is my list of top 10 places that I'd gladly never set foot in again during my lifetime.

It's not that they are intrinsically bad places. I just didn't have a good time and just don't want to go back. Here we go, in Top-40 countdown style:

10. Jury's Hotel, Waterford City, Ireland
I stayed here one new year's eve and it was such a disappointment. The main bone of contention? I was a resident staying in the hotel but they wouldn't let me eat in the restaurant because the whole restaurant was reserved for a new year's gala dinner for guests who had paid for the special new year's package. Did I know about this when I booked the room? What do you think?

The hotel's suggestion... you can always order room service. Imagine how many restaurants were open on new year's eve in this little city.

The next day they tried to charge me for the dinner they wouldn't let me have. A lasting impression indeed. And bloody freezing too. I think this Hotel has changed ownership in recent times, and not a moment too soon.

9. Some godforsaken hotel in Nice, France
Holy crap! what a disappointment. Heading for Nice in the south of France you could be forgiven that there might be a decent standard of accomodation down there. It's the côte d'azur for heaven's sake, you know Monaco, Cannes and all that. The Hotel was in the old part of the city of Nice and looked like it had been built in the 1920s and last decorated in the 1920s too. I kid you not when I tell you it was a kip. It had one of those old lifts that 2 people could fit in, barely. You'd step into the lift and swear there was some quasimodo-type character on the roof pulling the lift up. Brutal. One time I got bored waiting for the lift, probably after about 10 minutes, and decided to take the stairs. The thing I remember was the staircase between the first and ground floors being completely filled with rolls of carpet. I mean if you own a hotel and have a load of rolls of old carpet then the only logical place to store them is on the staircase of course. Needless to say if there was ever a fire sure the idiot guests could just take the lift. Duh!

8. Fu-King Chinese Restaurant, Amsterdam, Holland
Easily the worst customer service experience in my lifetime. Hilarious as a consequence but really something to remember.

I was there with a group of work colleagues and we arrived late in the evening, but then again this was Amsterdam and that's when the city is at its busiest.

There was a fair number of staff working in the restaurant but their English was awful and they weren't too fond of tourists it would seem. There was an old Chinese lady working there and she was clearly in charge because she was barking out orders, in some form of Chinese dialect, to all the younger members of staff.

We tried to order and she was pissed with us for some reason. One person in our party tried to order a starter as a main course and the old lady flipped. Then we foolishly asked for some glasses of water. This drove her bonkers too.

Then when the food came out one of the group took some rice from a bowl that was served with another dish at our table and she came running over shouting "that no come with rice!", trying to grab the rice bowl that we were paying for anyway.

The final straw was when we asked her to split the bill. Located conveniently adjacent to Damrak, the main avenue leading to Dam Square, the convenience of the location just won't be enough to ever drag me back there to that crazy old lady.

7. The Kensigton Hilton Hotel, London, England.
For some reason my stay in this hotel was like some kind of weird dream. Maybe trip is a better word.

The hotel is like some kind of set from Austin Powers, everything is styled in oriental fashion and I'm just not sure why. The bedrooms were tiny, there was Japanese TV programmes on the television, Japanese instructions on everything.

The breakfast restaurant was one of those "sitting down on low hard square thingies, still not sure what they were. The lobby was full of cabin crew from Japan Airlines.

Did I miss something here? Clearly I did. It was expensive and so not worth it. Hugely unimpressive and downright strange.

6. Finnstown House Hotel, County Meath, Ireland
A beautiful building set in a beautiful location. I personally found it a bit strange.

The only hotel I have ever stayed in where they served the same thing for dinner 5 nights in a row.

Not that unusual I hear you say until you learn that I was staying as a conference delegate and the conference rate came with a single option each night for dinner.

Fair enough, maybe there was 5 different chefs working that week and each forgot to tell the other "hey Tony, don't make chicken and rice tonight because that's what I made last night".

Because that's what happened, 5 nights of chicken and rice. I got out of there before I turned into a chicken.

5. The Comfort Inn, O'Hare Airport, Chicago, USA
Comfort, now there's a laugh. How did I come to be staying here.

Well I was travelling from Raleigh, North Carolina on my way back to Dublin via Chicago. I distinctly remember sitting in the plane on the tarmac in Raleigh-Durham airport, it was a scorching day and every door on the plane was open. We were going nowhere.

Why? Some clown in a private jet had landed at the airport and parked his little jet right behind our aircraft. We were trapped until the airport folks managed to locate the plonker pilot.

After about an hour's delay we took off but there was no way in hell that we would make our connecting flight. We landed, lined up at the airline desk to have a go at the airline people and were duly compensated with a free night's accomodation in this aforementioned establishment.

It wasn't the Four Seasons, that's for sure. It was dark, it was limited and most importantly it was RIGHT NEXT TO THE RUNWAY. I'm not kidding. It was LOUD.

We got the usual little bag of plastic toiletries, throwaway razor and toothbrush etc. Nothing, I repeat nothing, could compensate for the sheer deafening noise of the planes taking off all night.

Comfort Inn. Yeah, maybe if you are deaf.

4. Marriott Hotel, Portsmouth, UK
Portsmouth is a quiet naval city on the south coast of England. That, it appears, is the main tourist pitch over with.

Driving around one night looking for something to do and somewhere to eat, we pulled into a petrol station. After a quick browse through the maps, my colleague asked the lady at the counter if she had any maps that showed tourist attractions.

She looked at him, and then laughed out loud. She said "tourist attractions! There's none of that around here love. You're in the wrong place for all that. There's nothing to do around here." I regret to say that she was, in hindsight, pretty much being honest.

Hey, every city has its charms so I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt, let's assume my colleagues and I just didn't look hard enough.

The hotel was unique for the overwhelming smell of chlorine from the pool. The pool was immediately adjacent to the restaurant. Nice smell of chlorine while eating breakfast, eating dinner, waiting for a taxi. You get the idea.

I think it says something that my own best memory of the hotel was the shoe polishing machines next to the lift. So, not all bad.

3. The Hilton Hotel, Basingstoke, UK
I can't help but think that Paris Hilton does not always stay in a Hilton Hotel when she travels.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and bet that she doesn't party the night away in Basingstoke too often.

What can I say? The hotel was just a big travel lodge (the english equivalent of a motel) and just not what you'd expect of a Hilton.

We had the misfortune to be waited upon by a psycho waitress the first evening and she took a dislike to my female colleague. We foolishly asked to move to a more pleasant table and she was not pleased.

She then threw all her waitress training out the window by signalling her dislike of my colleague by serving me, the guy, first. She did this for every course and by the end of the evening it was hilarious and bizarre.

We ventured into downtown Basingstoke the following day. It had the feel of watching one of those movies about "the day they dropped the A-bomb on Basingstoke". There was nothing happening. Nothing. Not even bacteria.

Then about 3pm there was an invasion of pensioners, hundreds of them. All with a singular and powerful goal. A nice cup of tea and a fruit scone. We had to get out of there. I can't go back. Oh the flashbacks.

2. Zoetermeer, Holland
Yes. The whole town. I'm afraid so. I spent a month here a few years ago and didn't have any really bad experiences at all.

In fact there are a few decent restaurants there.

It's just a bit, well, dull. I mean in the morning everyone gets on a train and leaves for work somewhere else. In the evening everyone comes home and goes into their apartments and closes the door. It's dull.

The train station is a feature, so that's saying something. I won't go through all the weird things about the hotel where I stayed. There were too many things to list. It's not bad as such, just absolutely no reason to want to go back there.

1. Shannon Airport, County Clare, Ireland
Right. Let me be frank. This is absolutely the number 1 place on earth I just don't want to visit ever again. It's the kind of place that I can only ever visit by bad luck. It's a forced stopover airport between Ireland and flights to and from the USA. The Irish government forces some flights to make a stop here to give the local economy some custom from US tourists. The airport is devoid of anything worthwhile or interesting on the inside of the building. Granted you could get a cup of tea, have a beer or take a whizz. That's about it. It's like airline limbo or something like that. If Dante was around today and writing the Inferno section of The Divine Comedy I'm pretty sure that Shannon Airport would be in there.

Cathartic.