Is Tulsa Worth Visiting?
As part of our quest to go to all 50 states of the US, we needed to strike Oklahoma off the list so we decided to visit Tulsa. After managing to snag good flight deals to Tulsa, OK from Sarasota, FL, we are slowly reaching our goal one state at a time! Here’s our honest post if Tulsa is worth visiting. This post covers which airline to fly on a budget, how much things cost, where to stay, and links to our other Tulsa OK posts which includes a three day itinerary, where to go, and a day trip to Bartlesville from Tulsa.
Contents
Click on the links below to read more posts about our trip and for guides:
Want to read more about weekend and 3 day travel trips? Here are a few ideas:
To get the most of your hard earned cash, we always recommend looking at ultra low cost carriers and trying to buy the tickets from the airport. You can stack the savings and use the proceeds to pay for entrance fees and other experiences.
Our favorite ultra low cost carriers in the US are Allegiant and Breeze. Here are some of our reviews of these airlines:
For our trip to Tulsa, we took Allegiant Air from SRQ (Sarasota-Bradenton airport) to TUL (Tulsa airport) for $64 per person, round trip. We saved even more than the rack rate online since we booked this flight from an airport counter, where we saved $36 per ticket per person, or $18 per leg of the trip.
Probably one of our best Hilton redemptions is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For 10,000 Hilton HHonors points a night, roughly around a $50 valuation, we got to stay at the Hilton Garden Inn Tulsa – South. While the hotel was not even close to downtown Tulsa, it is only a 20 minute drive, and close to a lot of restaurants within a 5 minute drive. The hotel is also really close to Broken Arrow, OK, in case you need to head that way.
We booked this hotel before the crazy gas prices and inflation so the drive to downtown from the hotel and back was not that expensive at the time. Calculate if staying on the outskirts of town makes more sense redemption/cash wise than staying in town in your case.
There are a lot of other Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, Choice and IHG hotels that have amazing redemption rates in Tulsa. We chose to use our Hilton points since we have a lot of them as compared to others and made the most sense for our type of travel.
Read more about hotel redemptions:
A quick 20 minute drive from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Hilton Garden Inn ticks all the boxes for us. It is a cheap redemption, has free parking, and is close enough to food options nearby. The rooms are big and comfortable, and with the Hilton My Way benefit, we got free breakfast for two every morning.
We paid a total of 30k HHonors points for 3 nights. Our redemption value is around 2 cents per Hilton point, a really amazing deal for Hilton HHonors, where you’re lucky if you can get more than half a penny redemption if you don’t mind driving and staying in the suburbs of Tulsa.
Breaking down our costs below, the total for our 3 day trip to Tulsa for two people is $
This Tulsa trip amount does not include souvenirs, since you may or may not opt to buy souvenirs in the city. We do include the car rental, gas, food, airfare, hotel, and entrance fees to attractions so you can help plan your budget accordingly.
We booked our rental car closer to our flight date using Budget Rental via Costco Travel ($209 for 3 days). This averages around $71 per day, which is a bit more than what we were paying for pre-pandemic. However, it is a good deal considering that there was a shortage of rental cars after the pandemic which made daily prices go higher.
Alternatively, you can also rent cars on Turo. We opted not to go that route since the cost is slightly the same, and we can get a free second driver through Costco. Insurance is covered by our credit card, the Chase Sapphire Preferred so we did not pay extra for that.
This is for half a tank of gas when we were driving a Kia Soul.
We already covered a little bit about these food options in our three day in Tulsa itinerary post, but we also created a Nola’s Tulsa food review post. You can read more about them below.
We opted to visit a lot of free things to do in Tulsa. However, we ended up paying entrance fees for a few attractions as well. Here’s how much we spent.
Things would have cost more if we ended up visiting the Tulsa Air & Space Museum, the Botanical Garden and the Zoo, but we didn’t, as it was also a budget trip.
If we add up all our trip costs, here’s our final breakdown.
All of these add up to a budget of less than $100 per person per day for everything. Not too bad. A lot of this is thanks to points too. Accommodation is one of the more expensive costs for travel, so having points to get free nights is definitely something we strategize for.
Yes, and no. Coming into the city as a tourist, we were surprised that there are quite a few things that we can do in the city. One can cover the major tourist sights to see if visiting for only a few days, but not so much if one is staying for over a week.
We stayed for three days, and opted to go on a day trip on our third day. Factoring in that we only got there at lunch time on our first day and had to work on our second day, it was a total of 1 ½ days spent in the city.
What we were surprised with the most is that a majority of the tourist sights were donated by people who got rich from oil or other endeavors. The Gathering Place was donated by the family who owned BOK – Bank of Oklahoma, while the Philbrook Museum used to be owned by the family who founded Phillips 66.
Even Bartlesville, a quick 50 minute drive away from Tulsa, has sights dedicated to the Phillips 66 founders, like the house that Frank Phillips lived in and of course, the Phillips 66 museum. It’s just a completely different thing from what we were used to, you can see income disparity all over from those days.
Given that it is one of the biggest cities to visit in Oklahoma, yes, Tulsa is definitely worth visiting. However, I would not bother staying too long. Oklahoma City is just 1 ½ hours away on a toll road, and there are other quirky stops along the way if you drive through Route 66. Arkansas is a quick trip away, with Bentonville less than 3 hours away.
It is a good road trip city to stop in, if you’re like us on a quest to visit all 50 states. It’s also a good place to fly in if there is a really cheap airfare deal from your city. We travel to different places because we see cheap airfare deals, because why not? When will be the next time we might have a chance to visit again? Allegiant changes their routes every so often so who knows if they will keep this route for the years to come.
So in a nutshell, don’t be afraid to visit cities that are not that popular. You never know what you’ll get to see and explore unless you actually go and experience the city for yourself.
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