Measuring how great a city is can be hard. We know that – it’s why we run the Time Out Index, our annual poll of city-dwellers across the globe. That data is used by our experts to identify the best cities in the world, both for locals and travellers. But while we wait for our own 2022 findings, researchers over at Euromonitor have come up with their own pretty decent ranking of the best cities, for travellers specifically.
Up until 2020 – not a great year for travel, let’s be honest – the research firm ranked the cities based on the number of international arrivals. But for the past two years, it has instead focused six ‘performance pillars’: tourism infrastructure, tourism policy and attractiveness, health and safety, sustainability, economic and business performance, and tourism performance.
So, where came top in 2022? Rather predictably, it’s Paris, which fared particularly well in the tourist performance and infrastructure category. The French capital is just really bloody nice, isn’t it? Next is Dubai (also not much of a surprise), which came first in 2020 and was subject to a bit of a hooha last year after loads of influencers decided to jet off there in the middle of a pandemic. The third spot, meanwhile, went to perennial tourist magnet Amsterdam – despite introducing several measures to combat overtourism over the past year. Some things never change.
Here is this year’s top ten in full:
- Paris
- Dubai
- Amsterdam
- Madrid
- Rome
- Berlin
- New York
- London
- Munich
- Barcelona
Want to know how it shapes up against our own list of the best cities in the world? Check out our definitive ranking here.