A company looking at travel reviews found Louisiana to be home to the "happiest and most satisfied of tourists."
RewardExpert Inc. gave the Pelican State a score of 98.08 out of 100, based on user reviews. And those show visitors from Louisiana make the happiest tourists, according to the report.
The online service analyzed 878,561 user reviews of a total of 4,333 hotels in the United States. It ranked the "grumpiest" and "happiest" states for tourists using three key metrics:
- the number of one- and two-star reviews proportional to population;
- the number of one- and two-star reviews as a proportion of all reviews from that state in our data set;
- the overall average rating for all reviews by users from that state.
Louisiana earned its "happiest" status with the highest national average hotel rating at 4.18.
It also had a low number of negative reviews authored by its residents, both in proportion to its population share and the total number of reviews authored by Louisianans in the company's data set — both of which ranked 44th nationwide in this study.
Coming close behind Louisiana in happy travelers was Mississippi (94.667), New Hampshire (92.749), Delaware (92.453) and Iowa (91.585) to round out the top five.
Washington, D.C., was named "grumpiest." Also in the bottom five were Colorado, Oregon, California and Arizona.
