Scenic Chester Creek in Anchorage/Craig Medred photo
Anchorage has become an unmentionable
The data-crunching website Wallet Hub is out with its list of “Best Summer Travel Destinations (2025)” and guess what, the 76th largest city in the country doesn’t even make the list of the top-100 places to visit.
City number 76, according to World Population Review, happens to be good, old Anchorage, AK, a city sizeably bigger and far more scenic (at least when viewed from the Glen Alps overlook below Flattop Mountain) than Grand Rapids, Mich., which makes the top 30 on the list.
The country’s 134th largest city, Grand Rapids scored big points for its low “Travel Costs and Hassles,” for which it was ranked fourth best, and “Safety,” for which it was ranked 28th.
The Safety rank, according to WalletHub’s methodology, was determined by a combination of crime rates split 50-50 between violent crime and property crime. Scratch Anchorage from any hope of scoring well in that category. It has become a city where anything that isn’t locked down is likely to be stolen.
The website City-Data reports an Anchorage crime rate “higher than in 96.9 percent of U.S. cities,” making Anchorage even worse than Bakersfield, Calif., last on WalletHub’s list of the top 100 summer vacation destinations.
This is the same Bakersfield that has attracted attention as one of California’s 10 most dangerous cities, but its crime rate, according to City-Data, is only 1.8 times the national average, which puts it below at two times the national average.
Grand Rapids is at 1.7 times, which isn’t so hot either. But it does boast the Gerald L. Ford Museum and the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Meyer May house in the Heritage Hill Historic District, which is a draw for those interested in American architecture.
Anchorage is no mecca for architecture, historic or otherwise. But it has become the capital of poly blue-tarp architecture. Its parks are now filled with “homes” built of such tarps. Some of these homes even come complete with sprawling “yards” that fill what were once were public spaces with junk and pilfered bicycles, coolers, chairs, propane tanks and the other accouterments of the homeless lifestyle in the north.
This is the homeless problem. Anchorage is not unique in that regard, but other cities have recognized that tolerance for bad behavior encourages bad behavior and chosen to put some sideboards on homeless camps.
Seattle, another very liberal city, in April declared it had removed 8,000 tents belonging to the homeless, leading The Seattle Times to report the city was on “a breakneck pace that shatters recent historical precedent.”
But Anchorage, a city in which tourism is a major industry, continues to squabble over what ot do about the camps making a mess of its parks.
Unfair
That said, the WalletHub “Summer Travel” list is somewhat stacked against Alaska’s largest city.
Lovers of outdoor recreation, especially wilderness outdoor recreation, would surely give Anchorae a better “Activities Rank” than Grand Rapids, but the WalletHub scoring system makes that impossible.
Grand Rapids came in 54th for activities based on more than two dozen criteria that include per capita swimming pools and golf courses, the availability of “affordable restaurants ranked 4.5 stars or more, the number of water parks and amusement parks, the number of coffee shops and hiking trails and more.
Anchorage would score maximum points for hiking trails and coffee shops, but it gets goose eggs for water and amusement parks, and is sure to score near the bottom for golf courses (there is only one) and swimming pools of which there aren’t many.
Not to mention Anchorage being a no-show on “TripAdvisor’s ‘Top 25 Beaches’ list, and lacking “warm water,” two other criteria.
And the city might well score negative points for “Quality of Parks,” given that many of the city’s parks have been given over to the homeless to do with as they wish. Thank the Anchorage chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has since 2010 vigorously argued in court that the homeless have a right to squat on public lands in the municipality.
Some of that technically illegal camping had always gone on in Alaska’s largest city, but it was done much more discreetly before the ACLU pushed the idea that such is a right of those struggling with poverty.
Since then, what one might call Alaska-style hunting camps have popped up with clusters of shelters built in most city parks and often along the city’s once scenic multi-use trails. It’s not a good look for a city interested in tourism, but it is what it is.
Still, one might have hoped Anchorage would have at least made the top-100 destination cities ending with Bakersfield, which appears to have been hoisted onto the list by a top-five weather rank. It was number four there despite global warming heating things up in California.
The weather rank is basically based on how well cities scored on “mild weather conditions year round.” Bakersfield gets hot, hot, hot in the summer, but it is seldom muggy; there is almost never any rain; and nighttime temperatures drop into the mid-60s to low-70s, meaning mornings and evenings can be nice.
Anchorage is cooler and wetter and has been known to experience summers in which days of 70 degrees or warmer were rare. There were only 10 days in which the thermometer hit that temperature in 2023, and on average there are only 16 days of 70 or above over the course of an Anchorage summer.
The city is not a great destination for sunbathing, and its biggest attraction is. to be honest, Alaska – that place generally outside of Anchorage, although not that far outside. The half-million-acre Chugach State Park on the very edge of the city remains one big wilderness area.
But WalletHub didn’t include a rating for the availability of wild spaces close to the city, and when it comes to Alaska, the big, wild-land attractions are national parks, not state parks, with the clientele heavily weighted to the “B4UDie” crowd.
Everyone should see Alaska before they die. This is, after all, the continent’s last great expanse of untrammeled nature as it once was everywhere. Plus one of the few places in North America where it is still possibly to see the glaciers that once covered much of the continent but have been retreating and retreating and retreating….
And the good news for the Alaska economy is that when it comes to summer travel destinations in the north, the tourism business in general is far more about “Alaska” than about “Anchorage.”
Kenai-Soldotna and Juneau arguably had betters chance of making the WalletHub list of summer travel destinations than Anchorage. There, and elsewhere outside of the state’s largest city, another good year for tourism is expected, although much of that is based on a rebounding cruise ship business.
“…Strong visitor numbers are anticipated this year, with slightly more than 2024’s
1.8 million cruise ship passengers expected,” Alaska Economic Trends, a publication of the state Department of Labor, reported in January.
The pandemic played such havoc with that part of the tourism industry that it once looked to be dead in the water, but it is now back.
“After reaching 1.3 million visitors in 2019, the count neared zero in 2020 with COVID-19,” the state reported. “Visitor counts were a small fraction of normal the following year before climbing back to 1.2 million in 2022 and then jumping by nearly half a million in 2023.”
Anchorage is major stop for many of those tourists, but largely a pass-through city rather than one where they spend time, given that in many ways the distractions in the Anchorage of today outweigh the attractions.
On some level, it’s not hard – no matter how much you love the city – to see why Anchorage didn’t make the cut.
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