About Miami Tourism Guide
Miami Tourism Guide is an independent travel resource about one city and its surroundings. Not Florida. Not “the Caribbean and beyond.” Miami — plus the stretch of South Florida you can reasonably reach and return from in a day, which is how most visitors actually use the place.
The reason for that narrowness is simple. Miami is a city that trips people up. It looks like one destination in photographs and behaves like five different ones on the ground. South Beach and Coral Gables are twenty minutes apart and share almost nothing. A restaurant that is the best meal of your trip in January may be closed by August. Parking in Wynwood on a Saturday night costs more than dinner did in 2019. Broad Florida guides gloss over all of it. We would rather go deep on a small area than shallow on a large one.
What is on this site
More than 120 guides, organised into twelve sections that map to the decisions people actually make when planning a Miami trip:
- Travel planning — when to go, what it costs per day, getting in from MIA or FLL, and how to move around a city built for cars.
- Things to do, neighbourhoods and day trips — from the Everglades and the Overseas Highway to the difference between Little Havana on a Tuesday and Little Havana on Viernes Culturales.
- Where to stay — because “Miami” and “Miami Beach” are two different cities with two different bills, and booking the wrong one is the most common mistake we see.
- Food, nightlife and shopping — Cuban ventanitas through to the Michelin list, Bal Harbour through to the Design District.
- Arts and culture, events, family trips and romantic trips — Art Basel week, Ultra, Zoo Miami on a hot afternoon, and the sunset cruise that is worth the money.
How we research Miami
Every guide starts from primary sources rather than other people’s listicles. For anything with an authority behind it, we go to that authority: the National Park Service for Everglades and Biscayne, Florida State Parks for Bill Baggs and Oleta River, Miami-Dade County and Miami International Airport for transit and arrivals, and individual venues — PAMM, Frost Science, Vizcaya, Zoo Miami, the Arsht Center — for hours, ticketing and closures. Restaurant and nightlife coverage is cross-checked against the Michelin Guide and local press including the Miami New Times. The Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau is used for official event dates and neighbourhood boundaries. We link out to these sources so you can check them yourself.
Miami’s calendar drives the revision schedule. Hurricane season runs June through November and changes the advice about travel insurance, flight timing and rates. Spring break reshapes South Beach for several weeks each year, with rules that have changed repeatedly since 2022. Art Basel Miami Beach moves prices across the entire city for one week in December. Guides touching those windows get looked at before each one comes round.
What we are careful about
Two things go stale faster in Miami than almost anywhere: prices and restaurants. Hotel rates here swing by a factor of three between a February weekend and a September weekday, so figures on this site are given as ranges and as of a stated season, never as a single quoted price. The restaurant scene turns over hard — a place that opened to acclaim can be gone within eighteen months — so we favour venues with a track record over whatever opened last month, and we say so when a recommendation is new and unproven.
We also do not pretend to have eaten at every restaurant or stayed in every hotel we mention. Where a recommendation rests on published reviews, official information or reader reports rather than a personal visit, the guide reads that way. Confident-sounding invention is the thing that makes travel content useless, and it is the failure mode we work hardest to avoid.
How the site is funded
By affiliate commissions. Our accommodation and activity links are routed through a booking partner, Stay22, which adds commission tracking to them automatically: we get commissions for bookings made through links on this site, and the price you pay is the same either way. We are also preparing to carry display advertising, which is described in the privacy policy. Nothing on Miami Tourism Guide is sponsored, and no hotel, restaurant, tour company or venue has paid to appear here or to be described the way it is.
A booking therefore earns us something, which makes it worth saying plainly what it does not change. No hotel is in a guide because of what it pays, no partner sees an article before it is published, and we still tell you when the free option is the better one — the Metromover, the beach at Crandon Park, the second Saturday gallery walk in Wynwood. Every guide carries a disclosure at the top, and the affiliate disclosure has the detail.
Corrections
Hours change, venues close, and we get things wrong. If you find something on this site that is out of date or simply incorrect, tell us on the contact page and we will check it against the source and fix it. Corrections to factual errors are made to the guide itself rather than buried in a note at the bottom, and the revision date on the page is updated when we do.