Of the roughly 8 million locations and activities on Tripadvisor, which ones regularly bubble their way to the top 1 percent of popularity?
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In the United States, it’s an acclaimed space-launch center, a studio where Elvis cut his tunes and (in the Bay Area) a historic island prison, among other fascinating destinations.
So says the 2025 Tripadvisor “Travelers’ Choice Awards” for Top Attractions, which recognizes destinations that draw high ratings and reviews over a 12-month period, with a little filtering from the company’s travel editors.
Tripadvisor defines Top Attractions as places that travelers can visit without booking a ticket. Globally, these include famous sites like the Basílica de la Sagrada Familia in Barcelona (No. 1) and the Anne Frank House in the Netherlands (No. 7).
Here in the U.S., Alcatraz Island lands at No. 10 for domestic wow-you destinations, with the editors asserting the “views on the way over are worth the trip alone.”
Here are the first 10 most-popular attractions in the U.S. this year; for the full list of 25 visit Tripadvisor.
Tripadvisor’s top attractions in the U.S. for 2025
1 NASA Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Merritt Island, Florida
2 Empire State Building, New York, New York
3 Sun Studio, Memphis, Tennessee
4 Central Park, New York, New York
5 Stetson Mansion, DeLand, Florida
Sun Studio in Memphis, 2024. (Jim Harrington/Bay Area News Group).
6 John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, Key Largo, Florida
7 Brooklyn Bridge, New York, New York
8 National Museum of World War II Aviation, Colorado Springs, Colorado
9 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York
10 Alcatraz Island, San Francisco
Source: https://www.tripadvisor.com/TravelersChoice-ThingsToDo