We all know Chicago has some phenomenal tourist attractions: Navy Pier, Millennium Park, the Sears (Eh, fine… Willis) Tower. The list goes on and on. We all know and love them for their charm and signature Chicago bravado.
Know what else we love? Tourists (and hot dogs).
In a recent study conducted by Stratos Jets, The Windy City ranked as the number one tourist lover by a wide margin. And when we say wide margin, we mean Chicago dominated the competition like Michael Jordan in a rec league. Check it out for yourself:
Another surprising factor, we were far ahead of our buddies on the coasts. Check out where New York and L.A. ranked on the tourist hate factor:
What’s more, Illinois was the top state for tourist love by an even bigger margin. We’d give you a cool analogy for this one too, but… alright, we’ll give it a shot. Illinois dominated the competition like Alinea dominates the restaurant business. Here’s what we’re looking at:
Now you’re probably wondering how these ratings were conducted. The answer: Twitter. Stratos Jets pulled 37,171 geotagged tweets from June 1, 2014 to July 20, 2015 containing the terms “tourist” and “tourists.” There was quite a bit more sorting and threshold related work that went into it, but we won’t bore you with the statistics. You can find the complete study on their site.
There ya have it, Chicago is the top tourist-loving city in the U.S., and Illinois is the top state in the country. Not too shabby if you ask us.
Photo Credit: Green Curtain Events