We read the news and we said, well duh. Las Vegas, already named WalletHub’s best city for recreation, recently added the finance website’s title of “Most Fun City”—n a landslide, we might add.
The study noted the city has it all: the ability to host large music festivals, concerts and residencies along with having some of the country’s top spas and an obscene number of retail centers, comedy clubs, sports stadiums and theaters. The fact that this is all found crammed into a relatively small area probably helped in the rankings, too.
The study also mentioned how Las Vegas is tops for outdoor recreation, not only for its own hiking trails and recreation areas like Red Rock Canyon and Mount Charleston, but for being just a short drive to national parks in California, Arizona and Utah.
What WalletHub did to come up with the results was to compare 182 American cities and analyze data in three specific areas: entertainment and recreation, nightlife and parties, and affordability. They crunched the numbers and created the list.
“The most fun cities naturally include some of the most popular tourist destinations in the U.S., like Las Vegas, Orlando and Miami, but these cities are far more than tourist traps,” writes WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo in the report. “They provide a wide range of indoor and outdoor activities for all types of interests, from sports to theaters to arcades, and they have plenty of diverse restaurants to try. The top cities offer affordable options for year-round fun for their residents, which is good for residents’ wallets and their mental health.”
As for your other fun cities, Orlando comes in a distant second followed by Miami, Atlanta and New Orleans. We were surprised, though, how low some of our favorite cities fared in this study; we’re talking about Honolulu (16), Los Angeles (18) and San Diego (21), which does make us question this analysis a bit.