Where Have Americans Been Going on Their Virtual Vacations? Here’s a State-by-State Breakdown
Country-wide (and world-wide) shutdowns and stay-at-home orders have left most of us to satisfy our wanderlust with virtual travel instead of hopping on a plane or train. Luckily, there are a number of museums, national parks, gardens, famous homes (like Buckingham Palace) and even the Stonehenge Summer Solstice event for us to explore online, all for free. And while we certainly know which virtual adventures we’ve personally been taken advantage of, we can’t help but wonder: Where have the rest of you been going?
Fortunately for us, the folks at FrontierBundles were also curious and so compiled a mass of interesting stats on just which online tourist attractions have been the most popular these past few weeks, broken down by state. Here’s what they found.
Thirty one states preferred international destinations over domestic, although it seems both New Yorkers and Californians prefer to keep things local with in-state museums proving the most popular in each (the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Monterey Bay Aquarium respectively).
Floridians, Georgians and Texans also preferred home-state tourist attractions with the Walt Disney World Resort, Georgia Aquarium and Houston Zoo coming out on top. Fun fact: The Houston Zoo is the second-most visited zoo in the United States, after the Bronx Zoo, despite the fact that it’s only one-fifth the size.
Residents of New Jersey and Colorado seemed to be inspired by the fact that their quarantines began during Women’s History Month (March), leading to a surge of visits to the National Women’s History Museum.
France was unsurprisingly a hot virtual destination with tours of the catacombs of Paris, Versailles and The Louvre proving most popular in eight states, while Italian museums proved popular out west, specifically the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Those living in Rhode Island have had some pretty strong urges to hop across the pond to Europe with a multi-national three-way tie for the top spot featuring The Louvre in France, the Uffizi Gallery in Italy and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
One surprising stand-out is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was the most-visited virtual destination in not one, not two, but three states—Arizona, Oregon and Oklahoma. It currently houses over one million works of art including a huge selection of pieces by the Dutch Masters Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh. Who knew?
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