Washington, D.C. has been ranked number 11 on WalletHub’s recently released list of “2019’s Best Places for Valentine’s Day”.
D.C. got an overall score of 66.01 in the list with a budget rank of 19, and activities rank of 5. The city also got a Gift Accessibility rank of 22 and Weather Forecast rank of 54.
Ahead of Valentine’s Day, personal finance website WalletHub determined the most romantic and cost-effective cities for celebrating it by comparing 100 largest U.S. cities according to 25 key metrics, including florists per capita, forecasted precipitation, and cost of a three-course meal for two.
“Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for celebrating Valentine’s Day. For metrics marked with an asterisk (*), we used the square root of the population to calculate the population size in order to avoid overcompensating for minor differences across cities,” says the WalletHub report. “We then determined each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.”
WalletHub also compared 100 of the most populated cities across four key dimensions to determine the list of best cities for Valentine’s Day. They include budget, activities, gift accessibility, and weather forecast. Cities in the surrounding metro areas were excluded from the ranking link.
The data used to come up with the ranking list was collected from various sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau, Council for Community and Economic Research, Google Ads, Walkscore.com, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Eventbrite, and AccuWeather, among other sources.
According to an annual survey recently released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics, this year Americans are expected to spend a record amount of $20.7 billion on Valentine’s Day, which is six percent more than last year’s spending of $19.6 billion. In 2016, $19.7 billion was spent on Valentine’s Day.
DC Ranks 11th in Condé Nast Traveler’s 2018 Best Big Cities List
