By: Brittany Anas | From: Forbes

Travel guides and lists are often filled with cliches promising to take you off-the-beaten path or deliver you to hidden gems. In the last year or so, this has been especially true with the rise of the dupe travel trend, which is the idea that, instead of vacationing in a popular spot, you can seek out an alternative destination that has a similar vibe or scenery. But the thing is, many tourist attractions are popular for a reason: They’re great. And to help quantify the best of the best, BookRetreats, a leader in retreat bookings, used data sets to curate a list of the best U.S. tourist attractions.

For the report, analysts evaluated 77 of America’s most popular points of interest, evaluating popularity, overall experience from a dataset that included 7,500 visitor experiences, hotel price points and state-level safety rankings.

Here’s more on the findings and a list of the top 20 tourist attractions in the United States, that, yes, draw millions of tourists, but are also worth putting on your travel bucket list.

 

What Do The Top Tourist Destinations Have in Common?

Several of the top 20 places to visit in the U.S., according to BookRetreats, are natural attractions. That’s because, the analysts say, beautiful landscapes have a knack for meeting or exceeding tourist expectations.

At 1,200 acres, Balboa Park in San Diego is larger than New York’s Central Park. Visitors can purchase a Balboa Park Explorer Pass and visit a number of the park’s fantastic museums, seeing folk art at the Mingei International Museum and the San Diego Natural History Museum, which will be opening a new fossil processing lab with a glass wall so visitors can watch scientists in action.

Another nature-centric highlight on this list is Garden of the Gods, a park with towering red rock formations in Colorado. Stay at the Garden of the Gods Resort and Club for up-close views of one of the park’s most popular rock formations, the Kissing Camels.

 

What Are The Top 20 Tourist Attractions in the USA?

Ahead, the top attractions for tourists, according to the BookRetreats analysis.

No. 17: San Antonio RiverWalk in San Antonio, Texas