When you go on holiday or travel to an unfamiliar destination, it’s always reassuring to know you’ll be warmly welcomed by the locals.

Being surrounded by friendly faces and helpful people in a foreign city can really make your experience all the more valuable and fulfilling.

To support this year’s theme of ‘Innovative Governance, Open Cities’, TravelBird has carried out a study to reveal the friendliest and most welcoming cities in the world.

The travel provider has highlighted the cities all over the globe that are making solid efforts to welcome tourists. The study also intended to explore how over-tourism is having an impact on local communities.

The ranking was worked out by analysing 500 tourist destinations, taken from the UN-WTO, based on several factors. These included a welcoming port of entry, such as airport or train station, citizens’ happiness, safety, tourism capacity, openness to hosting tourists and English language proficiency.

On top of this, TravelBird asked over 15,000 travel journalists to provide their expert opinion on how welcoming they found each city based on their own experiences. They used this to create a final ranking of the top 100 cities.

The most welcoming city in the world was found to be Singapore. Dublin was the highest ranking city in the British Isles, coming in at 13th place, followed by London in 29th place, Glasgow in 31st, Edinburgh in 33rd and Liverpool in 37th. See the top 10 cities in terms of friendliness below.

10 Most Welcoming Cities