Singapore has again come in the limelight as being the world’s most welcoming city earning high marks for safety, world-class airport and willingness to host tourists. The ranking has been done by holiday website TravelBird.
Singapore has emerged on the top leaving behind competitors-Sweden's Stockholm, San Francisco in the US, Japan's capital Tokyo and Switzerland's Zurich. Bottom-ranked cities included Russia's Moscow, Vietnam's Hanoi and Hungary's Budapest.
TravelBird, ranked a total of 100 cities across the globe, according to factors such as expert opinion, port of entry, safety, happiness, English proficiency and openness to accommodating tourists.
The Lion City scaled high on various parameters. It earned a perfect score of 10 for port of entry, while the index also gave the country high scores for safety (8.95) and openness to host tourists at home (8.6).
Singapore earned an overall score of 8.22, with Stockholm (8.02), Helsinki (8.01), San Francisco (8) and Rotterdam (7.98) rounding out the top five spots.
Regarding the methodology, thousands of cities were initially examined – based on data from the World Tourism Organisation – before the index focused on the top 500 destinations according to tourist arrival numbers.
Moreover, an expert poll was also conducted with more than 15,000 travel journalists, asking them how welcoming they found each city based on their personal experiences, was also taken into consideration.
Cities deemed to have suffered from overtourism were marked down. Such cities struggle with the impact that having too many tourists has on the local population and the environment, and have taken steps to limit their numbers in recent years.
Steven Klooster, chief executive of TravelBird, said, “We devised this study as the first step towards a more sustainable future. It's a call to action to ourselves and to fellow tour operators, to residents and local governments in those places that are worst affected by overtourism, to work together to find solutions to this problem.”