COVID-19 has hit the world and safety measures including social distancing is helping slow the spread. For the most part, staying home means seeing the world will likely have to wait. 

Or will it? The internet comes to our entertainment rescue again, and this time it’s not bringing us an early release of Trolls 2 or educating us about the unusual life of large cat ownership in Tiger King. Instead, the world is coming straight to us from our devices, computers, and TVs in the form of virtual tours. 

Places like the Catacombs of Paris, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the Louvre can now be accessed like never before. For each destination, there is a website you can visit that will have the virtual tour available. You and your family can wander through the Palace of Versailles or select which live cam to watch at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Always wanted to explore Machu Picchu? Now you can by using a virtual tour.

While an in-person experience can’t be replaced, a virtual one can help you and your family leave your couch behind and see the wonders that the world has to offer. 

With these online destination tours quickly growing in popularity, the team at FrontierBundles.com wanted to know which attraction each state’s residents visit the most. Find out below where people in your state like to go for a home-away-from-home tour. 

Each State’s Most Popular Virtual Tour Destination

The virtual world is your oyster. Where do you want to go?

With Washington residents favoring the sights of Athens, and Indiana and North Carolina residents preferring to tour the Museum of Art of São Paulo, every state’s residents have hot spots they like to virtually visit. Find your state to help determine where your next virtual vacation should be. 

Interesting Highlights 

• Rhode Island had a three-way tie for three popular European museums: The Louvre, Uffizi Gallery, and the Van Gogh Museum. 
• Even though New York was the only state to have the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its residents’ favorite, the museum’s website received thirty million site visits pre-pandemic—32 percent of which were international users.
• The majority of states—55 percent—preferred international attractions for their entertainment.
• The Catacombs of Paris, which stand on a whopping 2,000 acres, were the strongest draw for North Dakota residents. The Catacombs are sixty times bigger than the state’s popular Red River Zoo. 
• By the late 1800s, more Italian immigrants settled on the Pacific coast as opposed to New England. This might explain why several western states preferred Italian museums for their virtual tours. 
• Texans favored a virtual visit to their own Houston Zoo. It is the second-most visited zoo in the United States, even though it’s only a fifth of the size of the Bronx Zoo. 
• California had three attractions battling for the highest number of virtual visitors, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium came out on top. The museum initially cost $55 million to construct in 1978—equivalent to over $200 million in 2020.

Methodology

The team at FrontierBundles.com started by consulting the top five virtual tours listed from a Google search and pulled from the following sites: TravelandLeisure, Refinery29, Good Housekeeping, RealSimple, and HarpersBazaar. We then assembled a list of forty attractions hosting virtual tours during the COVID-19 outbreak. To find each state’s top pick, we used this list and Google Trends to determine which attraction each state searched for most between March 4th and April 3rd, 2020.

FrontierBundles is an online authorized reseller of Frontier.
Please direct all media inquires to javier.mendoza@ftr.com.