Please allow me to be the first poster to offer: Arkansas.
No offense intended to AR dopers - what is there that would get me to drive or fly from Atlanta to come see anything? Or a doper from CA or NY? I understand Vegas and Hawaii. The Hot Springs really don’t interest me, do they bring in a lot of outsiders?
Next candidate: West Virginia. Been there. LIVED there. Not much to do.
I’m not trying to piss anyone off, I’m just offering up my candidates for the thread. Please don’t take my suggestions as insults. By the way, you good folks in Louisiana have been getting my tourist dollars since 1983, with no letup in sight. We LOVE a long weekend in NOLA.
Hey! We’ve got the FargoDome!!! and…um…Custer was here for a bit before Little Big Horn.
/Loves ND…grew up there and there isn’t a better place to live.
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis site:
This is borne out by my experience. My only two trips to the Peace Garden State were made by my parents, siblings, and me to visit my mother’s parents, who lived in the city of Mayville from the mid-1970’s to early '80’s. My brothers and sister often slept during long drives, but I always stayed awake so I could see as much of the country as possible. However, the monotonous scenery of a stretch of highway in western North Dakota (we continued on to Yellowstone National Park after visiting Grandma and Grandpa) actually lulled me to slumber.
I spent a few days in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It was a very nice trip. They have some absolutely beautiful lakes and a botanical garden that is worth seeing. They have the trolley cars and nice little antique shops and book stores, etc. We toured the Crescent Hotel, which is over a hundred years old. My mom saw the Passion Play. The Ozarks are scenic. I plan to visit the Clinton library in Little Rock next summer.
Here’s some factual data: The Bureau of Economic Accounts keeps track of state-by-state revenues broken down by industry. What’s even cooler is that you can download the data as a .csv file and do your own spreadsheet analysis. They don’t have a “tourism” industry, unfortunately, but there is a “hotels and lodging” category and an “amusements and recreation” category.
I looked at the 2001 data. If we assume that the two categories I mentioned represent “tourism”, then the state the gets to most dollar revenue from tourism is California (nearly double runner-up Florida) and the state that gets the least is… North Dakota (handily beating Delaware).
If we look at the percentage that tourism makes of the total gross state product, then the state that does best is Nevada (no surprise, over 17% – runner up is Hawaii at only 6.4%!) The state that does the worst is… (drumroll…) Alabama, at 0.67%, followed by Oklahoma at 0.76%. Other states under 1% are Arkansas, Delaware, Kentuck, Kansas, and Nebraska. North Dakota actually comes in at 19th from the bottom in this metric.
As an alternate, looking at just lodging as a percentage of state product still leaves Nevada and Hawaii at the top, with Delaware, Ohio, Oklahoma, Connecticut, and Alabama at the bottom. North Dakota actually does pretty well here, coming in the top half.
I vacationed in N. Dakota a couple of years ago, specifically because no one goes there. I wanted to camp and hike where there aren’t any tourists, no trails, few roads and great scenery; just me a compass and a topo map. 1 million acres of grassland (with badlands) was fabulous. I went back twice.
Oh and the women are almost universally very attractive.
I seem to remember an episode of The West Wing where one of the subplots involved some people from North Dakota who were trying to get the state’s name changed to “Dakota”. They complained that South Dakota got so much more money from tourism than they did, and they thought it might be partially due to the word “North”. ND is only just barely cooler than SD, they said, but in people’s minds, “North” makes it sound colder than it is. By comparison, it makes SD sound like some tropical paradise. At the time, I wondered if the writers just made it up, or if it was based on a real movement. Does anyone know if there really are groups of North Dakotans trying to change the name of their state?
And don’t forget the tax-free liquor. That alone persuaded me to go there a few times.
As for West Virginia, we used to go there a lot when I lived in Maryland. It has Harper’s Ferry and absolutely gorgeous scenery - as I recall, there’s a particular highway that gets bottlenecked every weekend in the fall just from people driving around to see all the leaves change colours.
Here’s something interesting. I noted above that the top two tourism states in terms of percentage of gross state product are Nevada and Hawaii. Who do you suppose is number three? Take a guess.
Can’t for the life of me remember where I read this but about 10 years ago one of the Dakotas was talking about changing its name and a magazine ran a contest for the best new name. The finalists included Manitscolda, Zipdecoatup, Saskatchacold and Land of the Frozen Dead.
I’ve toured all 50 states, and take it from me, the one where it was hardest to find places of interest was North Dakota. The places we did visit certainly aren’t the type that would attract people not specifically seeking to do all 50 to choose it over another.
Loopydude:
It’s nice, but Badlands National Park in South Dakota is just as nice if not better…with the added asset of being only two hours or so away from all the attractions in the Black Hills (Mount Rushmore, etc).
The GQ, as it specifically relates to money, appears to have already been answered, but speaking from experience, North Dakota is pretty far down on the tourist-fun list.
I’m not surprised by your number three – down on the Gulf Coast, there are a ton of casinos, plus the beaches of course. Casinos=money, and beaches also bring in families. I wouldn’t go anywhere else in Mississippi, though…
Can’t be Kansas… we’ve got the world’s largest ball of twine, the world’s largest hand dug well, the world’s largest steam shovel, world’s largest (concrete) prairie dog, Dorothy’s house in Liberal(!) KS, Lebanon KS is the geographic center of the continental US… shall I go on?
