San Diego, Las Vegas and Honolulu Lead the List for 2020

San Francisco and New York City did not make the list largely due to high hotel room rates, but a dozen “second-tier” and a few smaller cities with more attractive hotel rates made the list for the first time. Pittsburgh, Boise and Tampa are three examples. All have affordable room rates and above average scores in most other areas. Pittsburgh benefited from a change to the tourism ranking factor which now considers a city’s parks. A few other cities in our top 25 with an abundance of city parks are St Paul, Madison, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon. The scoring of weather changed this year to favor milder climates and more cities from California appear than before including the number one city for conventions in 2020, San Diego. 


    Walkability, affordable hotel rooms, distance of airports and the number of direct flights, safety and tourism infrastructure/appeal are city assets that have proven to make for good convention experiences. To determine the best convention cities, we measure each city by these assets using the convention center as the focal point. SEE: Explanation of the criteria used for the ranking of the best convention cities in 2020

    Note: Only cities with convention centers are eligible for the annual top 25 list.  Click here to see the ranking of all 166 USA cities used in the report.

    Sources: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml
     https://censtats.census.gov/cbpnaic/cbpnaic.shtml
     https://www.bestplaces.net
     https://www.flightsfrom.com/
    https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/passenger_allcargo_stats/passenger/media/cy15-cargo-airports.pdf
    https://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104877
    https://www.walkscore.com/
    https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/land-based-station-data/land-based-datasets/climate-normals/1981-2010-normals-data https://pennenvironment.org/sites/environment/files/reports/Trouble%20in%20the%20Air%20vPA.pdf