San Diego, Las Vegas and Honolulu Lead the List

Walkability, affordablilty of hotel rooms, ease-of-access, safety and tourism options are city assets that have proven to make for good convention experiences. To determine the best convention cities, we measure these things using the latest statistics.*

Scoring for the final rating category, weather, changed this year to favor milder climates and more cities from California appear than before including our top pick for 2020, San Diego. 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. 


    *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