New awards honor the worst in travel

Doug Lansky knows that half of the travel experience involves adventure and beauty, those transcendent moments when you see, hear, smell, taste something completely new, when you become, if even for the briefest of time, a little less like your old self and you know you will return home different for good.

Then there's the bad stuff.

To celebrate the lesser aspects of travel (or least to stop pretending that they don't exist), Lansky has created the Titanic Awards, an online site inviting tourists to share their horror stories.

Visitors to the site are asked to complete a survey of the worst in travel and he's already managed to garner hundreds of responses since launching in late May.

Some sample results thus far:

*With 1,200 respondents from 75 countries thus far to the question of which nation has the worst cuisine, Britain leads the pack with 25.1% of votes, followed by the United States (10.3%), China (3.5%), and Russia (3.2%).

*Makers of the worst beer? More than 1,600 from over 80 countries say the United States (23% -- with Budweiser leading the voting for worst brew), China (5.2%), Britain (4.1%), Australia (3.7%), and France (3.4%).

*Toilets? Over 1,200 from more than 75 lands say the big stinker is China (18.8%), followed by India (15.9%), France (4.5%), Italy (3.9%), and Mexico (3.3%).

*Lamest of the new wonders of the world, according to over 1,800 people from more than 80 countries: Christ, the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro (a whopping 53.6%), Chichen Itza (12.7%), Roman Colosseum (9.5%), and Taj Mahal (8.8%).

At some point, Lansky wants to compile all this results into a kind of anti-tour guide of what the prudent traveler can feel good avoiding. Check it out.

iStockphoto.com shot of Christ, the Redeemer