Summer travel has a way of making people optimistic to the point of carelessness. That works out fine in some cities and considerably less fine in others.
There are many ways to choose a summer vacation spot. Property crime rate is not usually one of them. Vivint pulled FBI incident data on burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts for 25 popular American vacation destinations during the peak summer months of 2024 and ranked them accordingly.
A few cities earned their reputations. Others did not.
The safest summer destinations, according to Vivint’s analysis:
- Park City, UT (136 per 100,000)
- San Diego, CA (139)
- Santa Barbara, CA (139)
- Charleston, SC (156)
- West Palm Beach, FL (158)
- Boston, MA (181)
The riskiest:
- Honolulu, HI (442 per 100,000)
- Seattle, WA (415)
- Philadelphia, PA (408)
- Denver, CO (401)
- Nashville, TN (398)
- San Antonio, TX (394)
Park City’s composite rate of 136 per 100,000 residents is the lowest on the index. Honolulu’s 442 is the highest — more than three times Park City’s, and a figure driven largely by larceny, which runs at 943 per 100,000 in Hawaii’s capital during peak travel months. For context, the national burglary rate runs 4.7% higher during June through August than the rest of the year, averaging around 66,000 monthly incidents. According to the FBI, a break-in occurs every 28 to 40 seconds in the United States, and empty vacation homes are a reliable target.
The trend numbers are where some summer itineraries start to look like a bad idea. Miami’s property crime rate jumped 60% since 2022, the single largest increase in the study. Nashville added 22%. West Palm Beach, meanwhile, sits about an hour up the Florida coast from Miami and dropped 34% over the same period — the biggest decline on the list. Florida apparently contains multitudes.
California, for its part, moved uniformly in the right direction, with San Francisco down 31%, Santa Barbara down 18%, and San Diego down 1%. Honolulu, despite its top ranking on the riskiest list, also dropped 27% since 2022 — meaning it has improved considerably and is still the most crime-prone popular vacation spot in the country.
One city that doesn’t make headlines as a crime destination but probably should: Kansas City, which has the highest motor vehicle theft rate of any popular travel destination at 565 per 100,000 residents. Leave the rental car unlocked at your own risk.