America's Most Popular Zoos: Top 41

Zygodactyl said:
I'm surprised Miami isn't more popular, considering that it's the most visited US city by foreign travelers, popular with American travelers, and it's an absolutely amazing zoo (sadly, the City of Miami sold off the only undeveloped land near it, so future expansion will be severely limited), especially in terms of its some really clever innovations in its beautifully laid-out exhibits and the sheer variety of birds it has.
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It is simply in an out-of-the- way location and difficult for tourists to reach. Besides, international tourists to Miami usually have other things on their minds, IMO
 
Along that same line of thinking, I'll bring up another reason: Los Angeles is famous for many other things and people usually come here to do those other things. Studio tours, Hollywood, the Griffith Observatory, Santa Monica, the Getty Villa, Beverly Hills, La Brea Tar Pits, LACMA, and Venice Beach are all here and it is these kinds of attractions that draw tourists to LA. San Diego has several interesting things too, but the Zoo is up there for them. LA Zoo is not.[/QUOTE]

Probably correct. We have to remember that Zoo Chat folks are the sort of people who think of any city and want to go to the zoo. Most people, you come to Los Angeles as a tourist, of all the things you think to do, "the Los Angeles Zoo" isn't on the list whereas when most people think of San Diego they think of the zoo.

Both are excellent zoos and if you're in the area, the Santa Barbara Zoo is quite a connoisseur's piece.
 
Genuinely surprising to me that San Diego isn't in the top 3. It is also puzzling that the National Zoo is much lower than the St. Louis Zoo when the former is in a larger city. Given that they have the same major advantage, being free, that is, you'd think the National Zoo would come out on top. Also the National Zoo has giant pandas which is a huge draw to the public, whereas St. Louis does not.
 
cloudedleopard611 said:
Genuinely surprising to me that San Diego isn't in the top 3. It is also puzzling that the National Zoo is much lower than the St. Louis Zoo when the former is in a larger city. Given that they have the same major advantage, being free, that is, you'd think the National Zoo would come out on top. Also the National Zoo has giant pandas which is a huge draw to the public, whereas St. Louis does not.
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The National Zoo competes with so many attractions though. Everyone going to DC has to make tough decisions about which of the 20 museums, dozen monuments, and government buildings they want to visit. Most of the aforementioned attractions are near the national mall, while the zoo is not too close to this area where tourists congregate.
 
nczoofan said:
The National Zoo competes with so many attractions though. Everyone going to DC has to make tough decisions about which of the 20 museums, dozen monuments, and government buildings they want to visit. Most of the aforementioned attractions are near the national mall, while the zoo is not too close to this area where tourists congregate.
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This.

Also, at one time the National Zoo had a few animals that one could not see anywhere else (other than San Diego) such as Pandas and Komodo dragons - now dragons are everywhere and Pandas are more available nationally.

Further, since many people have zoos in their home town, there is a limited "reason" to visit the National Zoo when having to make a choice between it and all the other museums and sites - of which are fairly or entirely unique to Washington DC.
 
The National Zoo has also been closed much more than any other zoo, due to being a federal government property. They were among the first to close from covid and last to open again.
 
nczoofan said:
The National Zoo competes with so many attractions though. Everyone going to DC has to make tough decisions about which of the 20 museums, dozen monuments, and government buildings they want to visit. Most of the aforementioned attractions are near the national mall, while the zoo is not too close to this area where tourists congregate.
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That does make sense. The St. Louis Zoo is also very popular among people visiting the city. From my experiences working retail and talking to all kinds of different customers most people coming from outside the city said that they either went to the zoo or planned on going.
 
snowleopard said:
I find zoo attendance numbers fascinating because in the nation's 3 largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago) the zoos of Bronx, L.A. and Brookfield all have numbers lower than anticipated. There is simply a tremendous number of competing attractions in those areas while in cities like Omaha, Toledo and Columbia the zoos are the #1 game in town.
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This is an old post, and you or others may have seen this insight elsewhere by now -- but if you ask most people in Chicago about a zoo, they think about Lincoln Park. It is in the heart of the city near other cultural attractions like the museum campus, it doubles for many as a park in a generalized sense for people who are not as interested in the animals, and the fact it is completely free attracts parents with children in general, but also especially disadvantaged families and school trips, and less surprisingly, families who otherwise might not be interested in a zoo at all but enjoy any attraction that is free. Locals do take pride in it and while it is not as beloved as the major museums or the aquarium it is still well up there.

Brookfield isn't really viewed by most locals as part of Chicago and would probably struggle to make a tourtists' list of attractions. It is suburban, and to its detriment, this suburban setting can also come off as both literally and figuratively less accessible in comparison. While Lincoln Park often attracts people who are disadvantaged due to its accessibility, Brookfield has sometimes been seen as a zoo for the affluent (this is not a common perspective at all, to clarify, but it does exist) and it is also often seen as out of the way. A few friends of mine have found it difficult to locate compared to downtown cultural destinations, even after multiple trips, including from a friend who travels to a nearby attraction quite frequently. (It helped as a child that my father had once lived in Brookfield.)

Furthermore, it is more expensive for families, and there is no obvious to the typical visitor incentive to pay more or spend more time there when the ABC species are pretty similar to Lincoln Park, and the Shedd Aquarium has dolphins and cetaceans. I would think orangutan could have helped but their exhibit is so easy to miss that I would feel bad if it swayed any visitor, and the difference in tigers is only a year or so out. The elephants did help in the five or so years only Brookfield held them, they did get some positive local publicity for that. For the most part though, while us zoochatters love that Brookfield has a lot of unique species like pangolin, okapi, wombat, and so forth but there are none further that actually matter more to the average visitor I think than a Lincoln Park equivalent.

This all contributes to why Lincoln Park has become such a fantastic zoo and replaced almost all of its outdated exhibits in such a short time -- when courting donors, they can discuss their inherent accessibility and their ability to educate disadvantaged communities, bringing animals to people who may never see them. The donation is not only public but very visible, and can be easily contextualized as benefiting people as much as animals. They can talk about their role in the community as a cultural institution, as Chicago's zoo.

Brookfield's fundraising has no such narratives, instead often focusing on its role as a conservation leadership center, which is not a strong pitch for people who are not already presumably supporting zoos, or falls to being about trying to keep the lights on.

I do think Brookfield and LA are overshadowed not only by other local attractions but also in both cases by being relatively close to other zoos.
 
Since I posted the list of figures on this thread 9 years ago, there have been some substantial changes. Some zoos tweaked how they calculated attendance figures and that is reflected by ups and downs with numbers that can be researched via Google. There's been successes and failures during this time period, with some zoos stagnating while others have surged.

Disney's Animal Kingdom is often listed as having approximately 9 million annual visitors these days, which is down significantly from almost a decade ago. San Diego Zoo, which has opened a lot of new animal attractions in the interim, has been pulling in around 4 million visitors each year and that's a sharp increase. (And yet San Diego wants to start charging for parking!) Some zoos are down 100,000 or so, like the faltering Los Angeles Zoo, while others are on par with what they were at in 2016.

A massive upswell of attendance has been part of Nashville Zoo's success, with 1.4 million visitors in recent years and with a new parking garage already open and an upcoming African Safari complex, that zoo is projected to have yet more visitors streaming through their doors in the future. It didn't even make my list 9 years ago and yet I wouldn't be surprised to see it make the top dozen soon.

Another facility that didn't make the list is North Carolina Zoo, but there's been notable success since then, almost 1.1 million visitors in 2023, and after the new Asian area opens up then I'm sure that attendance figures will be much higher as the new Australian zone will be on the horizon after Asia.

Oakland Zoo is another establishment that wasn't on the original list but has hit 1 million visitors in some years, especially after the $75 million California Trail complex opened in 2018. Fresno Chaffee Zoo has also surged into the million club. If you build shiny new exhibits, then people pour through the turnstiles. Easy peasy. ;)

What other zoos have seen a significant increase or decrease in attendance since 2016?
 
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