Best US Cities for Vacationing on a Budget

Discount travel booking site announces its top 10 list

Top 10, top 20, top 100 and top whatever other number you want to pull out of a hat can be pretty tedious, but I'm somehow intrigued by a new one from Hotwire, the discount travel booking site. The Hotwire Travel Value Index lists the cities that offer the greatest values -- note that these aren't necessarily the cheapest but ones that provide good value.

Hotwire scored the cities 25 percent for air, hotel and car-rental discounts; 50 percent on low prices for air, hotel and rental cars, and 25 on overall appeal, affordable entertainment and choice of accommodations. I'm not sure how they came up with these parameters that seem partially redundant, but here's their list of the 10 cities that achieve these requirements (last year's ranking in parentheses, where applicable).

1. Orlando (3)
2. Atlanta (5)
3. Denver (4)
4. Dallas-Fort Worth (2)
5. Phoenix (1)
6. Houston
7. Los Angeles (6)
8. Tampa
9. Washington, DC (7)
10. Chicago