The single biggest mistake is treating Nashville as a one-neighborhood city and spending the entire trip on Broadway. Not because Broadway is bad, but because it represents about 5% of what the city offers, and the people who stay exclusively on it leave with a partial and often frustrating picture of Nashville.
The Broadway Trap
Broadway at 9 PM on a Saturday is legitimately overwhelming for a first visit. It’s loud, crowded, and expensive. The free live music is real, but the bars are standing-room-only, drinks cost $12-15, and the crowd is predominantly bachelorette groups and people on their first night out. That experience convinces some visitors that Nashville is overrated.
The same street on a Tuesday afternoon at 2 PM is a different place. Robert’s Western World has the Brazilbilly band playing to 50 people in a room where you can actually stand at the bar, hear the music, and talk without shouting. The fried bologna sandwich costs $5. This is the honky-tonk experience, and most first-timers never find it because they only visit Broadway when it’s performing as a tourist spectacle rather than a music venue.
The Reservation Failure
The second most consequential mistake is not making restaurant reservations in advance. Nashville’s best restaurants have wait times that don’t shrink for walk-ins. Hattie B’s Hot Chicken regularly runs 45-90 minute waits on weekend afternoons. The popular East Nashville brunch spots have queues from 10 AM on Sundays. Restaurants like Henrietta Red and The Pharmacy in East Nashville fill reservations days in advance for weekends.
The fix is simple: book restaurants when you book your hotel, not when you land. A three-day Nashville trip needs reservations secured for the meals you care most about.
Hotel Location Cost
A third mistake that shapes the whole trip is booking a cheaper hotel far from downtown to save money and then spending that savings on rideshares. The pattern is predictable: hotel 10 minutes from downtown at $100/night versus $180 downtown. The math looks favorable until you add $15-25 per Uber trip, twice a day, for three days. The transportation cost frequently exceeds the accommodation savings, and you lose the flexibility of walking back from Broadway at 11 PM.
Cowboy Boots for a Full Day of Walking
This one is physical and direct: new or barely-broken-in cowboy boots are not suitable footwear for 8-10 miles of walking on Nashville’s uneven sidewalks and bar floors. The mistake is buying or packing boots specifically for the trip and then wearing them all day. By afternoon, the discomfort ends outdoor exploration early. Pack actual walking shoes, wear them for the active portions of each day, and bring the boots for evenings if that’s the goal.
The Single Mistake That Encompasses All the Others
If you reduce it to one thing: not planning ahead at all. Nashville is a city that rewards research. A visitor who books a Listening Room Cafe show in advance, makes restaurant reservations, knows which honky-tonks to hit and when, and has a neighborhood plan beyond “walk around Broadway” will have a substantially better trip than someone who arrives expecting the city to deliver itself without preparation.
The city is solid. The version of it that first-timers encounter without planning is a compressed, expensive, crowded subset of a much larger and better city.
Sources:
- Travel Lemming, “21 Nashville Tips,” March 2025 (travellemming.com)
- Travel Lemming, “A Local’s Tips on Avoiding Crowds in Nashville” (travellemming.com)
- Tennessee Whiskey Tours, “10 Mistakes First-Timers Make in Nashville” (tennesseewhiskeytours.com)
- Nashville Experience Tours, “4 Things NOT TO DO on your Nashville Visit” (nashvilleexperiencetours.com)
- Nashville Limo, “Visiting Nashville: How to NOT Look Like a Tourist” (nashvillelimo.com)
- Nashville To Do, “Expert Warns Nashville Tourists to Avoid Common Mistakes” (nashvilletodo.com)