New York City tourists, July 17, 2014. (Photo by Flickr user Phil Roeder via Creative Commons license)
Tourism might be a trillion-dollar industry in the United States but that doesn’t mean all Americans welcome tourists with open arms.
For example, while excited visitors flock to New York City, the Big Apple doesn’t return their enthusiasm. Only Arlington, Texas, hates tourists more than New Yorkers, according to a study from Stratos Jets, a private air charter company.
Stratos analyzed positive and negative tourist tweets from across the country to reach its findings. Its researcher examined 37,171 geotagged tweets from June 1, 2014 to July, 20 2015 that contained the terms “tourist” and “tourists.” Stratos said it looked at 26 different cities with at least 100 related tweets.
Other popular destinations, including Las Vegas, Boston and New Orleans, are among the tourist haters. The states with the highest rates of tweets telling tourists to go home are Rhode Island, Delaware and Nevada. States with the least welcoming tweets @tourists are Delaware (again), Wyoming and Connecticut. The most welcoming are Illinois, Montana and New Hampshire.
That suggests visitors might find themselves most at home in Chicago, Illinois, since the study found both that city and the state are the most friendly to tourists in the United States.
(Graphic courtesy of Stratos Jet Charters)
(Graphic courtesy of Stratos Jet Charters)
Hmm, this seems unnecessarily alarmist. A few negative tweets were sent, doesn’t mean these cities ‘hate tourists’. Most New Yorkers are not even from New York anyway..BTW who even travels to Arlington, Texas? And Las Vegas? Everyone there is a tourists. Look at the hotels and casinos. They were not built for locals.
There are over 2 million people living in the Las Vegas valley. You have no idea what you are talking about. We love tourists because they fund our beautiful city. We stay away from the strip and let them have their fun.
I wonder if the way the data was collected justifies the conclusion. I presume that in the tweets the term tourist is used, but this alone does not indicate anything against tourists per se. Thus, if someone writes that he caught a tourist shoplifting, this does not mean he is against tourists, he just mentions this detail about the negative situation. In other words, one would have to read each tweet and see if there is a negative feeling towards someone just because he is a tourist. I am not sure that the research was that detailed — it would be labor intensive. Clearly, any place that attracts a lot of tourists would mention them in tweets, both positive and negative, but the question would be whether the specific fact of being a tourist makes someone less welcome.
I am a native New Yorker and lived there until my early 20s. My immediate family was anchored there until very recently. I’ve lived in many other places and now live in New Jersey. So when I go there I am a now tourist myself.
I do not believe New Yorkers treat tourists any differently than they treat each other. Personally I don’t like the place for many reasons but it is useful to me to be close enough to go there on a day trip when I need to. In fact New York City if anything seems friendlier and cleaner to me than it did decades ago although it’s not on the top of my list of the best places to be. New York City is for me overwhelming, not built or existing on any human scale I can deal with. Of all the cities I’ve lived in or near I’d pick San Francisco as my favorite.
In general I do not like cities or even suburbs anymore. The best place to live in America is in a rural area. The absence of stress more crowded areas impose on people far offsets whatever attractions and advantages cities have to offer. I’ve lived in a rural area for 15 years and hope to spend the rest of my days in such an environment.
You want to know a town that hates tourists? Try Paris France. I’ve heard it got so bad the French government gave tourists pamphlets telling them how to retort to insults from Parisians in French.
I am French and I have traveled a lot in the US, in different states (at least 25 different ones). I have never experienced any situation that would let me think that American people are not friendly with tourists. On the contrary… I think that it is really pleasant to travel in the US. In hotels, staffs are really nice, doing their best to make everything easy and pleasant for tpurists. It also depends a lot on the tourists; I mean, if you are polite, kind, smiling then, people will act in the same way as far as you are concerned. In shops, on the streets, American people usually are very helpful. In SanFrancisco and other places, I have always found someone to help me whenever needed.
Of course, in cities like NewYork, it may be a little different but it is exatly the same in Paris….People in those huge cities are completely stressed, runnning about all day long, surrounded with noisy cars, bad smells…etc…. No wonder they are not “happy”! And usually, when people are NOT happy with their lives, they are not ready to be cool, smiling and outgoing!!! The study shows that they do not welcome tourists…but I would rather say that they do NOT welcome anyone, even other New Yorkers!
But, New York excepted, I would say that for French people in general,traveling in the US is very often synonym of traveling in good conditions, meeting friendly Americans who are willing to help them., disccovering wonderful places and sharing with a lot of different people. It is a unique experience.
Hard to believe Las Vegas is in the top 5. If it weren’t for the tourist’s money the city would be bankrupt and the unemployment rate would skyrocket!
Yeah you’re right. That’s why I found that so weird as well
Another boring academic study with no basis in fact. Why is this worth noting at all?
As a fourth generation Floridian with experience of life in tourist oriented as well as rural areas, I think it would be more accurate to say we often “resent” problems caused by peak tourist influxes, like Spring Break for example. The biggest irritant is out of state drivers, but as we generally don’t have the mass transit services most metropolitan areas do, it’s something that we have to deal with. As tourism is our state’s second leading industry, Floridians are certainly accustomed to visitors to our state—how could we hate anyone for wanting to come here?
I am from Fort Worth, Texas, in the same county as Arlington: Tarrant. Arlington is an incredible hole!! YES!
Why do you say that Arlington is an incredible hole ?
Arlington, Texas is a massive array of immense apartment complexes of unending stretches with unbelievable difficulties of finding any one person’s or family’s habitation — street after street of bewildering mazes with three to four stories of nothing but identical exteriors. Otherwise, there are the equivalents of brick houses of “mass suburbia” where, some years ago, we in Fort Worth were told that housewives in Arlington were prone to clinical depressions or suicides. The stadiums for football and baseball congest the big streets with gigantic traffic hold-ups, because this very big place has NO bus system, NO mass transit like Dallas or Fort Worth, although Arlington is placed geographically directly in between the two cities. Dallas-Tarrant Counties are called the “Metroplex” where actually Dallas stretches eastwards into two or three more counties. The entire system of Dallas-Fort Worth is more than six counties: we are huge! And, without and bus system in Arlington, one CANNOT get there from Fort Worth without a car, BUT, everyone from Dallas and Fort Worth can get to each other by light rail. Arlington is simply a backward place where no one from my city wants to live. Thank you.
What is there in Arlington, TX for tourists to do?
There is a huge football stadium. There is a huge baseball stadium. There are two psychiatric hospitals. The streets are lined with endless walls of apartment house barriers. Everything is mass packed. We in Dallas and Fort Worth have houses with real yards for front and back. We have space. Arlington does not. Thank you.
IMO in a post industrial society where there are vast unused lands like the US, cities are obsolete and undesirable places to live or to be in. The concentration of people in a small area was necessary when transportation was limited and people had to live, shop, and stay close to where they earned a living. That is no longer true in the US. Cities should be abandoned as obsolete because they are overcrowded, dirty, crime ridden, stressful, and create massive problems which are increasingly unsolvable. China has plans to build a vast city in the Northeast part of their country to have a population of 130 million people. To my way of thinking that would be a hell on earth. Americans should spread out and enjoy the benefits of the rural life. Between the internet and our transportation system there is no longer any need for cities. How do you attack a nation where there are no concentrations of people? America is the only place of significance where this is a possibility.