Coming Thursday: New England’s Best Beach Towns 2012

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Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Tracey Minkin, GoLocal Features Editor

What is New England's Best Beach Town?

Thursday, August 9, GoLocal unveils its first comprehensive head-to-head comparison and ranking of New England's beach towns. This brand-new analysis utilized thousands of data points to assess and compare towns in every state (with a coastline) in the region.

From the Connecticut shoreline to Down East Maine, from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket to Block Island, from Cape Ann to Cape Cod, where are the very best spots to play hookey on a summer weekday, spend a sun-drenched weekend, or just drop it all and move to paradise?

Inspired by similar ratings of America's cities and towns from media outlets such as US News & World Report, Forbes, and Business Week, Coastal Living, and Yankee, GoLocal's evaluation took a brand new approach to assessing what makes a beach town great. A list of 33 finalists were assessed in 5 general areas: Environment, Walkability, Food & Drink, Lodging, and Beach Amenities. With metrics ranging from air and water quality, percent of sunny days, numbers of restaurants, bars, and ice cream parlors, hotel and B&B rooms, walkability ranking and a survey of 24 beach amenities from parasailing to nature trails, GoLocal's researchers culled national databases and spoke to hundreds of tourism professionals, chamber of commerce members, real estate agents, parks and recreation officials, as well as other locals to tabulate the many numbers that figured into the analysis.

Who comes out on top? Tune in tomorrow. Don't forget your sunscreen.

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