TripZillaWhen we travel, don’t we all want to feel… welcome? It’s something that travellers normally take for granted, but be greeted by the opposite of “welcome” and it’s sure to impact your mood and travel experience.
According to a ranking published by Amsterdam-based travel website TravelBird, out of 500 tourist destinations, Singapore is the most welcoming city on Earth.
How did they come up with this?
They analysed the top tourist destinations, as gathered from UN-WTO data, and analysed them based on “factors that can make a visitor feel welcome”.
This includes a welcoming port of entry, the city’s openness to host tourists, the English language proficiency and quite surprisingly, also the citizen’s happiness. On top of that, they conducted a survey that asks 15,000 travellers how welcoming they found each city based on their personal trips.
With that, these 15 cities came at the top of the list:
1. Singapore
2. Stockholm
3. Helsinki
4. San Francisco
5. Rotterdam
6. Lisbon
7. Tokyo
8. Oslo
9. Zurich
10. Orlando
11. Hamburg
12. Copenhagen
13. Dublin
14. Toronto
15. Nice
Singapore made it to the top spot thanks to a combination of its world-class airport and transport system, safety, number of hotel beds, English proficiency, and also the number of hosts they have on Couchsurfing!
As seen from the findings, the other Asian city that made it to the list is Tokyo, at seventh place. Two-thirds of the top 15 are dominated by European cities while the other spots are filled by North American cities: San Francisco, Orlando and Toronto.
The purpose of the study, on top of acknowledging the cities that are going to great lengths to welcome tourists responsibly, is to “open the dialogue about over-tourism”.
Over-tourism, a phenomenon that is increasingly in the spotlight, happens when the tourism surge in a city negatively impacts the quality of life in the area. This is prominent in cities such as Barcelona and Venice, where protests have erupted amongst locals who are unhappy about the effects of mass tourism.
In this study, elements of sustainable tourism are quantified through measuring the tourism capacity of each city, as well as a second survey that questions local residents on the impact of tourism on their lives.
