The Most Underrated Museums in North America

With International Museum Day on May 18th, we wanted to find the most underrated museums in the United States and Canada.

Whether it’s learning about different cultures, history or just taking in iconic pieces of art, trips to museums are generally an underrated activity by some. And with International Museum Day coming up on May 18th, we wanted to find the most underrated museums in the United States and Canada.

To do this, online casino Betway analyzed some lesser-known museums on how many Instagram posts they were “hashtagged” in, how many Instagram followers they have and reviews from Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google.

Using these factors, each museum was then given a final score out of 5 and the results can be seen below.

 The Frick Collection in New York City was crowned the most underrated museum across the US and Canada with a final score of 3.81.

The museum is currently closed for renovation, however it will be reopening later this year. Their final score was boosted by boasting the largest number of Instagram followers of any museum in the list (336,000), as well as largely favorable reviews on Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google.

The Frick wasn’t the only underrated museum in the Big Apple. The Met Cloisters, which is dedicated exclusively to the art and architecture of the Middle Ages, and Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image also scored strongly and were ranked in the top 10.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas is the second most underrated museum in the US and Canada. Only the Frick Collection had more Instagram followers than Crystal Bridge’s 130,000 and the art museum had great reviews across the board, including a perfect score of 5 on Tripadvisor.

When looking at Canada, Fort Edmond Park was ranked as the country’s most underrated museum. The park, located in Edmonton, Alberta, is a leader in cultural tourism and this month will be celebrating 50 years of bringing history to life.  While the park doesn’t attract as much social media attention as some other museums on the list, reviews from visitors were very positive and this led to a final score of 2.69.

While plenty of museums focus on traditional art, culture and history, one of the most underrated museums in North America will be a huge hit with sports fans. Judging by strong online reviews, the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in St. Marys, Ontario is a must see for any baseball fanatic and this is reflected in the museum’s score of 2.23.

Methodology

This dataset ranks North American museums, based on their reviews and how much attention they attract on social media. To do this, 5 different factors were used. Once the data for the factors was collected, the factors were then normalised, to provide each factor with a score between 0 and 1. If data was not available, a score of 0 was given.

The normalised values were then summed, to give the museums a total score out of 5. The museums were then ranked from highest to lowest, based on their total scores. 

The factors used are as follows:

·       How many Instagram posts included a museum’s hashtag.

·       How many followers the museums have on Instagram.

·       Tripadvisor reviews.

·       Yelp reviews.

·       Google reviews.

The factors were indexed as follows:

·       All Factors – High values get a high score. Low values get a low score.

All data is correct as of 13/05/24. The ranking data shown is a compilation of multiple data sources and may not be representative of real life. All data is accurate with regards to the sources provided.