How do I avoid tourist traps in Morocco?

The classic Moroccan tourist traps are not elaborate — they are the same few moves repeated, and once you recognise them they lose their power. The most common is the restaurant trap: the photogenic terraces ringing the main squares and the places with touts waving laminated menus charge a tourist premium for ordinary food. The fix is almost laughably simple — walk one or two streets back from the square to where Moroccans actually eat, where the same tagine costs a third as much and is usually better because the local clientele would not put up with worse.

The second cluster is all about misdirection. A stranger will tell you the road ahead is "closed" or that the tannery or square is "this way" and lead you on a detour that ends at a shop or a demand for payment; a friendly young man will fall into step practising his English and somehow deliver you to his cousin's carpet emporium. The honest defence is a blanket policy: decline all unsolicited guiding and "help," ignore the closed-road line, and never follow someone who approached you. If you want a guide, hire a licensed one through your riad; if you want directions, ask a shopkeeper in their own doorway.

The shopping and money traps are the third group. Be wary of any shop a "helpful" stranger steers you toward, because they are working on commission baked into your inflated price; in the souks the first number is theatre, so haggle from well below it and be ready to walk. Agree every taxi fare before you set off or insist on the meter, settle a guide or camel price out loud in advance, and carry small notes so a vendor can never trap you with "no change." The cooking demos, hammams and tanneries that someone insists you must see right now, with them, almost always come with a markup.

My honest perspective: none of this should make you paranoid, because the overwhelming majority of Moroccans are warm and genuinely helpful, and the traps are a tourist-economy reflex rather than menace. The goal is discernment — eat local, decline the unsolicited, fix prices first, use official guides, and apply healthy scepticism to anything that arrives unasked or sounds too generous. Travel even slightly like a local and the traps simply stop finding you. Prices and the usual hustles shift with the season and the city, so stay alert and confirm current norms as you go.