America’s Best Destinations to Visit This Winter, Ranked by Crucial Factors

When winter sets in and the temperatures drop, we each tend to go one of two ways. Those of us who like the idea of a snowy winter are happy to hunker down with a hot drink and make the most of the icy conditions. And those of us for whom the winter is just a long, cold, dark slog will likely start making (or at least, imagining) plans for a trip to milder climes.

And now, whichever way you might be leaning in 2025, a novel new study by finance website WalletHub has you covered for precisely that. 

On the search for the best winter destinations in the United States—for both lovers of cold and warm weather—the study’s authors analyzed data for over 60 different cities, across more than two dozen different metrics. Everything from travel times and airfare costs to local crime rates, taxi fare prices, local tourist attractions, the prevalence of coffee shops and restaurants, and even stats relating to public safety and crime rates were all taken into account to assign each destination a metric score for wintertime tourists.

Best Cold-Weather Locations

1. Chicago, IL
2. Atlanta, GA
3. Washington, D.C.
4. St. Louis, MO
5. Cincinnati, OH

Top of the list for cold-weather lovers this year was Chicago, with a total wintertime attractiveness score of 66.39. The Windy City ranked highly for both air fares and travel convenience, with the cheapest flights from other major cities requiring no connections.

It also ranked first overall for the number of local winter tourist attractions (Chicago boasts the tenth-highest number of ice rinks per capita, for instance), as well as scoring highly on other tourist-friendly metrics such as high-rated affordable restaurants and music venues. The city also had some of the lowest crime rates of all the cold-weather destinations in the entire study.

Coming in a tight second place on the cold-weather list, Atlanta scored 66.02 in the study, putting it less than half a point behind first-place Chicago. It might not get as cold or as wintry as some of the other cities in the list, but the study singled out Atlanta’s relatively cheap flights during the winter season, low crime rates, and prevalence of tourist-friendly restaurants and shopping outlets.

The city also ranked first overall for cold-weather activities—with all of those facts putting it some points ahead of Washington, D.C., in third place (with a score of 62.02). 

See the breakdown of the top 10:

The remainder of the top 10 consisted of St. Louis (61.49), Cincinnati (61.44), New York (60.74), Denver (60.26), Albuquerque (59.95), Kansas City (58.79), and Boston (58.11). At the bottom of the cold-weather list, meanwhile, Worcester, Massachusetts, was ranked 32nd out of 32 cities with a score of 42.15.

Despite that low ranking, however, Worcester was ranked second overall for tourist safety. Breaking the cold-weather data down more closely, however, saw some other cities and destinations rank more highly: The highest-ranking city overall in terms of travel convenience, for instance, was Minneapolis, while the lowest average local costs were found in Cincinnati. 

Best Warm-Weather Locations

1. Las Vegas, NV
2. San Diego, CA
3. Austin, TX
4. Dallas, TX
5. Phoenix, AZ

If retreating somewhere milder is more your idea of the perfect winter destination, the top city on the warm-weather list was found to be Las Vegas, which achieved the highest overall score of all the cities in the entire study. Ranked first for both local tourist attractions and warm-weather related activities, Vegas scored 74.33 in the study, thanks to similarly impressive rankings for factors like affordable accommodation, retail spaces, and outdoor activities. 

See the breakdown of the top 10:

Not far behind with a score of 71.20, San Diego came in second place on the warm-weather list, thanks to a mixture of several different factors, including airfare affordability and travel convenience, road safety, tourist attractions, and low crime rates. Austin, Texas, was ranked not far behind in third place with a score of 67.86, followed by Dallas–Fort Worth in fourth (with 67.35) and Phoenix (66.48) in fifth.

The remainder of the top 10 was rounded out by Houston (65.13), Tampa (62.88), San Francisco (61.73), and San Antonio (60.37). 

For more on how this study was compiled—including a full list of all the different tourist-friendly metrics the cities were ranked on—head to the WalletHub analysis here. 

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