America's 30 Most Visited Cities

METHODOLOGY

Before you place your bets on Forbes Traveler’s U.S. Most Visited Cities, a word about methodology: we started with two separate rankings based on two different sets of data, and then combined those lists for our final score. For our first ranking, we used the numbers from cities’ convention and visitors bureaus. These numbers are usually calculated based on factors like airport and cruise traffic, bed tax collections, attraction visitor counts and event figures. While most cities report overnight and day visitors, some report only overnight visitors. To correct for this, we augmented these overnight-only numbers with an estimate of day visitors (either provided by the convention and visitors bureaus or, where that was not available, by calculating our own estimate based on figures from another city of comparable size and geography). We have noted where day-visitor estimates were added to convention and visitor bureau numbers. A visitor is defined as one who travels 50 miles or more each way, omitting commuters. Cities are the Metropolitan Standard Areas as defined by the U.S. Census bureau, unless otherwise noted.

Because of the variability inherent in the numbers from visitors bureaus (they’re self-reported by the cities, which may use different sources and methodologies, and 2006 numbers are not yet available at all locales, for example), we looked at another, independent set of numbers: Smith Travel Research (STR) provided data on hotel rooms sold for the year 2006 in the major U.S. metro markets.

Our final list combines these two rankings and adjusts for overnight and day-trip reporting disparities. We weighted each list equally,by dividing each city's visitor and hotel-room number by the average in each category. (The average visitor number in the self-reported visitor category number was 24.8 million; the average in STR’s rooms sold list was 13.7 million.) We then added these two scores to give each city its final score. So, for example, Orlando’s convention and visitor’s bureau reported 47.8 million visitors for 2006. The category average was 24.8 million, giving Orlando a score in the “visitor” column of 1.93 above the average. In the “rooms sold” category, STR reported that Orlando sold 27.2 million rooms in 2006. The category average was 13.7, giving Orlando a score in the “rooms sold” category of 1.98 above the average. Orlando’s final score, then, is 1.93 plus 1.98, or 3.91, putting it in third place overall behind the number one city, which received a 4.5 total. (Click to the slide show to find out which took the #1 spot).

Convention and visitor bureaus’ figures are for 2006 unless noted otherwise.