Is Budapest a welcoming city?

31 October is World Cities Day, a celebration introduced by the United Nations. Related to this occasion, TravelBird concluded a complex study about how welcoming the popular tourist destinations are. They have calculated with regard to seven different features related to tourism, and made a list about the 100 most welcoming cities in the world. Budapest also made it to the list, receiving the honorary rank of…

…the 100^th. Indeed, the capital of Hungary ended up at the bottom of the list, right below Colombo in Sri Lanka, Moscow in Russia, Hanoi in Vietnam and Bucharest in Romania. Budapest received an overall score of 3.74, which is less than half of the top ranking Singapore’s score of 8.22. But how were these scores calculated?

First, they started with a more subjective factor: TravelBird asked over 15,000 journalists and experts to rate each city.

In this category, Hungary received the second lowest score after Cairo, Egypt.

It is a quite low rating, especially after Condé Nast Traveler’s recent favorable opinion. This list was dominated by Copenhagen, Denmark.

Then came the “port of entry” category, which meant the place of arrival, the first area that a tourist encounters after landing – so basically it is the area of the airport. Budapest received a relatively favorable rating here, being the 60^th on the list and beating Paris, Melbourne and Lisbon in this category.

The third property was safety, which focused on people’s perception of safety rather than the quality of public security. Among the top ten safest cities, three was from Switzerland and two from Austria, while the top safest city was Abu Dhabi. Budapest ranked 87^th.

The fourth category, which meant the overall happiness of the population, was dominated by Western Europe and the first three – Oslo, Copenhagen and Reykjavik, respectively – were from Scandinavia. The stereotypical pessimism of Hungarians was worth the 78^th place.

It is not surprising that in the English proficiency category, the first 15 entries were English speaking countries – ironically, Dublin exceeded all four British and six American cities on the list.

Some recent surveys claim that Hungarian people’s English skills are better. Budapest, here, ranked in the top half as the 45^th.

The category of “openness to accommodate tourists” gave Budapest the most favorable rank of all, the 27^th. This category was based on the number of hosts in each city and people’s willingness to invite tourists to their own homes. This branch was ruled by Paris, France.

The last category was “tourist carrying capacity”, which meant the number of registered hotel beds and peer to peer beds per residents. Budapest became 93^rd, while the top spot was taken by Doha, Quatar.

Source: TravelBird