The study, commissioned by outdoor retailer Kühl, analyzed 95,763 Google and TripAdvisor reviews across all 63 national parks. Researchers capped the samples at 1,000 of the most recent reviews per park, categorizing the overall sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative based on specific keywords. That produced a percentage for each park that reflects how often reviews contain feedback on frustration or disappointment.
However, national park fans need not be offended: in nearly all cases, disappointment stemmed from crowds, pricing, and infrastructure frustrations, not the scenery itself. Usually.
Photo: NPS/Kurt Moses
According to the analysis, Death Valley National Park recorded the highest negative sentiment rate at 12.3 percent. Common complaints included “packed,” “overpriced,” and “disappointed.” That may seem counterintuitive for a park known for dramatic desert scenery and the lowest elevation in North America, but Death Valley visitation has surged in recent years, especially during cooler months. The park reported 1,440,484 visitors in 2024, jumping by 31 percent from 2023’s 1,099,632 visitors. That’s high for a park with limited shade, far-apart services, and rough infrastructure in some regions.
However, the report does note that the park’s sometimes Martian-looking landscapes may not be for everyone. “The rock formation is not that great, quite dusty, hot, etc. Feels like an open pit mine,” wrote one recent Google review, while a recent TripAdvisor reviewer didn’t mince words: “This was the most disappointing national park of all of them we’ve been [to]. Hot and barren with little to no beauty.”
Photo: Petrified Forest National Park/Jacob Holgerson
The next most disappointing park, according to reviews, was Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, with 9.2 percent of reviews expressing disappointment, followed by Zion National Park in Utah (7.8 percent), Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota (7.7 percent), and Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky (7.3 percent). Across these parks, recurring descriptors included “underwhelming,” “too crowded,” and “packed.”
Depending on where the visitor went in the park, some of those descriptions could be correct. So many of Zion’s roughly five million visitors per year stick to the park’s Zion Canyon that it has a mandatory shuttle system, unable to accommodate the number of drivers that would otherwise crowd the area’s one road. It’s also understandable why someone may think Wind Cave and Mammoth Cave are crowded — as the parks’ caves are their main attractions, nearly all visitors opt for guided cave tours, with some tours able to accommodate between 40 and 110 guests at a time.
Visitors can find solace even in “disappointing” parks like Zion by visiting less-trafficked areas, such as Kolob Canyons Road. Photo: Zion National Park
In a word: no. In multiple words: definitely not. Even many of the reviews expressing disappointment with some parts of the experience are overall positive. Death Valley has an average rating of 4.87 out of five stars, while Petrified Forest is 4.79 out of five. Zion scores an impressive 4.52, while Wind Cave and Mammoth Cave are 4.44 and 4.55, respectively. Most reviewers across all sites report positive, often moving experiences, with reviewers calling Petrified Forest National Park “too beautiful and fascinating to capture,” “really nothing like it in the world,” and full of “epic desert colors and timeless landscapes.”
Researchers on the Kühl study suggests that crowding is the main annoyance for visitors to the most disappointing national parks. “Crowding takes center stage, especially in the most popular parks where narrow canyons, limited parking, or funneling to iconic viewpoints amplify the crush,” it writes. Fortunately, visiting many of these parks in the off season, or visiting the less crowded areas of the parks, can help set visitors up for a better experience.
However, if you have to visit during the crowded periods, adjusting your mindset may make a huge difference. A 2023 study in the Journal of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism found that social media posts can make visitors feel as though parks should be nearly empty, and that their opinion can be skewed by whether the park feels crowded relative to that, even when the crowd numbers are actually relatively low. 