Here’s The Most Popular Attraction In Your State (It’s Probably A Park)

According to a recent study by Musement, an international booking platform for travel and vacation experiences and attractions, the most popular attraction in your state, statistically, is most likely to be a park. Whether you’re looking to avoid the crowds or find out what all the fuss is about and join the fun, here’s the scoop on the most popular attraction in each state.

The method

To determine popularity, Musement turned to Google Travel, using the search engine’s “things to do” feature to analyze Google reviews. Eliminating hotels and casinos (which helps explains Nevada’s otherwise surprising result), Musement employed the simplistic methodology of tabulating the number of Google reviews for each attraction, reporting the top result as the most popular. Whether or not this is truly the most popular, or just the one that elicited the most reactions in the state (positive or negative), the results reveal some interesting trends across the country, regardless.

Parks reign supreme

Musement grouped the 50 state results into seven primary categories: historical place/museum, outdoors/national park, amusement/theme park, zoo/aquarium, entertainment, shopping center and monument/memorial, and color-coded the results accordingly on an entertaining infographic. At first glance, it’s easy to recognize that outdoors/national park is the most common result, with 16 states shaded light blue, but add to this the ten amusement/theme parks (light green) and even Rhode Island’s Roger Williams Park Zoo (dark green), and you’ll find more than half of the United States featuring a park of some kind as the most popular attraction around, according to this study. Depending on your flexibility, you may even be inclined to add several more of the zoos (the third most common result, nationwide, when aquariums are included) into your tally.

Outliers

While Mall of America may not be much of a surprise as Minnesota’s top attraction, four other states also feature retail (shaded orange on the map) as their biggest bang: Washington (Pike Place Market), South Carolina (Broadway at the Beach), Vermont (Church Street Market Place) and Massachusetts (Faneuil Hall Marketplace). The sole state representing the monument/memorial category (shaded red) is South Dakota (Mount Rushmore), though why the Gateway Arch monument didn’t earn Missouri a red color is something of a mystery; it’s been designated historical place/museum (dark blue). Rounding out the historical place/museum category are Texas (The Alamo), Michigan (The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation) and Alabama (USS Alabama), but perhaps the most unique attractions to make the map are those in the entertainment category (yellow), including New Mexico (Meow Wolf Santa Fe), Delaware (Dover International Speedway), Kentucky (Ark Encounter), Hawaii (Dole Plantation) and Nevada (Fremont Street Experience).

Caveat

If you’re wondering about attractions that span multiple states (like Yellowstone National Park), ownership in this study was given to the state containing the majority of the attraction (in this example, Wyoming).