Attractions & Tours
America's Best Museums
Tours, attractions, and experiences across America — booking direct where we can, vetted affiliate partners where we can't.
28 attractions
New York City
All Museum New York City
6 listings
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
America's museum, full stop — two million works across five thousand years in the Fifth Avenue palace, from the Temple of Dendur in its glass hall to armor, Rembrandts, and a rooftop over Central Park. The one every ranking starts with.
American Museum of Natural History
The dinosaur halls, the blue whale, and the dioramas that invented the genre — four city blocks of natural wonder on Central Park West, now with the Gilder Center's canyon-like halls and a butterfly vivarium. The great American family museum.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The museum that wrote the story of modern art — Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Monet's Water Lilies and Warhol's soup cans in Midtown, with a sculpture garden that is the calmest courtyard in Manhattan.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum
The twin reflecting pools in the towers' footprints, and beneath them the museum that holds the day itself — the Survivors' Stairs, the Last Column, the slurry wall. The hardest visit on this list, and among the most necessary.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Frank Lloyd Wright's white spiral on Fifth Avenue — the building is the masterpiece, a quarter-mile ramp of art under a glass oculus, with Kandinsky, Picasso and the Impressionists in the side galleries.
Intrepid Museum
A real World War II aircraft carrier on the Hudson — a flight deck lined with jets, the Space Shuttle Enterprise in its pavilion, a Concorde and a Cold War submarine: New York's best museum for kids who hate museums.
Chicago
All Museum Chicago
3 listings
Art Institute of Chicago
America's second-greatest art museum and many critics' first — behind the bronze lions on Michigan Avenue wait American Gothic, Nighthawks, Seurat's Grande Jatte, a hall of Monets, and the Thorne miniature rooms. Pound for pound, unbeatable.
Field Museum
SUE the T. rex — the most complete ever found — holds court in a marble temple on Chicago's Museum Campus, backed by a 122-foot titanosaur, a walk-through Egyptian tomb, man-eating lions, and natural history at imperial scale.
Griffin Museum of Science and Industry
The biggest science museum in the Western Hemisphere, in the last great palace of the 1893 World's Fair — a captured German U-boat, a working coal mine, the Pioneer Zephyr and a tornado you can stand beside.
Washington DC
All Museum Washington DC
2 listings
National Air and Space Museum
The Wright Flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, and the machines that reached the Moon — the Smithsonian's flight cathedral on the National Mall, free as all Smithsonians are but pass-gated, and freshly renewed by a top-to-bottom renovation.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
The bronze corona on the National Mall — the Smithsonian's most powerful museum descends to a slave cabin and Emmett Till's casket, then climbs through the movement to the culture floors. Free, pass-gated, and worth every bit of the planning.
The South
All Museum The South
2 listings
The National WWII Museum
America's #1-rated museum by its visitors, year after year — a six-pavilion New Orleans campus that runs the entire war, from the Higgins boats built blocks away to D-Day, the Pacific, and the new Liberation Pavilion's reckoning with what it all meant.
Space Center Houston
The museum with mission control attached — tram tours roll from the galleries into NASA's actual Johnson Space Center, past astronaut training floors to the restored Apollo control room, with a Saturn V, a shuttle piggybacked on its 747, and flown capsules.
Northeast
All Museum Northeast
2 listings
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Boston's half-million-work colossus — the country's best Japanese and Egyptian holdings outside their homelands, a Monet room to rival Paris, Sargent's murals overhead, and the glass-courted Americas wing. New England's one essential museum.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The temple atop the Rocky Steps — behind the most famous staircase in movies waits a top-five American collection: Duchamp's puzzles, a medieval cloister and a Japanese teahouse you walk through, Impressionist depth, and Gehry-renovated galleries.
Boston
All Museum Boston
2 listings
Museum of Science, Boston
Boston's science museum astride the Charles River — indoor lightning from the world's largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator, a planetarium, a giant-screen dome and the new Public Science Common overlooking the river.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
A Venetian palazzo in Boston built by one fearless collector — Titian, Rembrandt and Sargent around a flowering courtyard, every object exactly where she left it, and the empty frames from America's greatest art theft.
Missouri
All Museum Missouri
2 listings
Saint Louis Art Museum
The 1904 World's Fair palace on Art Hill in Forest Park — free every day, with the world's largest Max Beckmann collection, a Chipperfield wing and the best sledding hill in Missouri out front.
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Kansas City's free art museum — giant shuttlecocks on the lawn, Steven Holl's glowing glass Bloch Building, a celebrated Chinese collection and a Monet Water Lilies panel, all with free admission.
West Coast
All Museum West Coast
1 listing
Midwest
All Museum Midwest
1 listing
San Francisco
All Museum San Francisco
1 listing
Arkansas
All Museum Arkansas
1 listing
Washington, DC
All Museum Washington, DC
1 listing
Los Angeles
All Museum Los Angeles
1 listing
Ohio
All Museum Ohio
1 listing
Minnesota
All Museum Minnesota
1 listing
Houston
All Museum Houston
1 listing
Looking for a place to stay near these attractions?
Browse All Museum Hotels →