The tourism industry employs more people than any other industry in the world. Tourism plays a key role in the economy of almost every city. However, not all cities make tourists feel at home. Sometimes local residents secretly or openly make it clear that they are not welcome here.
The rating compiled by TravelBird will help to avoid such unfriendly places. After analyzing the impact of tourism on the megalopolises of different countries of the world and their residents, the travel company compiled a list of the friendliest cities in the world in 2017.
Methodology
The study began by examining thousands of cities, focusing on the top 500 destinations most popular with tourists. As a result, a final list of 100 cities in different countries was compiled.
The researchers consulted with tourism journalists and examined the level of tourism development and its impact on the life of each city in its top 100.
They then analyzed how hospitable each of these destinations was based on the following factors:
- The opinion of experts, for this, more than 15 thousand travel journalists were interviewed. They were asked about the cities they visited personally.
- The convenience of the location of stations and airports is the first place that a tourist sees when he arrives at a new place. Therefore, it is in them, in the very first minutes of his stay in a foreign city, that a traveler can feel like a welcome guest (or not).
- Security level. Here TravelBird employees relied on data from Gallup, OECD and UN.
- The happiness level of the townspeople. The data was taken from the 2017 World Happiness Report. There is another happiness rating, it is published by Bloomberg, only it does not include cities, but the happiest and most unhappy countries in the world.
- Knowledge of English as an international language of communication. Very often, English is the easiest language to communicate abroad. This parameter is important for understanding the bilingual possibilities of the city. For example, can they help an English-speaking tourist there.
- Possibility of placing tourists in the houses of citizens. As part of its research, TravelBird investigated how tourism affects the willingness of residents to host travelers. For this, the number of hosts (host parties) in each city was analyzed, the data can be found on the Couchsurfing guest network website.
After that, a relative ranking was created for each of these factors.
Top 100 friendliest cities in the world 2017
As you can see from the list, the most hospitable city in the world this year is Singapore. It has the highest score (10) for its airport, a high score for safety (8.95) and an excellent convenience for English speaking tourists (7.82). The worst situation in Singapore is the happiness level of its citizens, it is only 6.16 points.
How Russians are disposed towards foreign tourists
Of the Russians, the residents of the capital turned out to be the most unfriendly towards the visitors. Moscow was already in 97th place, behind in terms of friendliness to tourists and Ukrainian Kiev (86th place) and Russian St. Petersburg (57th place).
Why do you need a ranking of the friendliest cities on Earth?
“As a stakeholder in the future of travel, TravelBird has a responsibility to address the growing problem of overly high tourist traffic,” said TravelBird CEO Stephen Cluster. “We designed this study as a first step towards a more sustainable future.
This is a call to action for ourselves and for other tour operators, for residents and local authorities in those places that are most susceptible to influx of tourists. We must all work together to find a solution to this problem. We believe that tourism can have a positive impact on various destinations; if there is a clear understanding of the problems there, innovative thinking and common sense. Then we can preserve and protect these areas in the future. "