Bangkok Ranks Eighth Most Attractive City Worldwide
Bangkok ranks eighth in the 2026 Yanolja Attractiveness Index, which measures how often cities are discussed online and the sentiment of travel discussions across social media and review platforms.
Bangkok ranked eighth worldwide in the 2026 Yanolja Attractiveness Index, which looks at how often cities are discussed online in connection with travel and how positively people talk about their experiences. Yanolja's research put New York at No. 1, followed by Paris, Osaka, Kyoto and Seoul. Bangkok scored 7.48 out of 10, ranking fifth for "awareness" and ninth for "attractiveness" among 261 cities.
Awareness measures how widely a city is recognised and discussed online based on its share of relevant mentions across platforms. Attractiveness measures how positively travellers discuss their experiences of a city. Each score makes up half of the final ranking.
For Bangkok, festivals and events, accommodation, shopping, food and nightlife were identified as particular strengths. Other Thai destinations also made the list: Chiang Mai ranked 27th overall, while Phuket landed in the second tier (51st–100th) and Pattaya in the third (101st–150th).
Researchers analysed online tourism discussions posted between June 2025 and May 2026, covering 14 languages and drawing data from social media, blogs, forums and review sites including Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, Tripadvisor, Google, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com. An AI-based sentiment-analysis model classified mentions as positive, neutral or negative using 419 tourism-related keywords across 17 sub-categories.
However, the index measures how visible a destination is online and how positively it is discussed rather than providing a definitive score for infrastructure, affordability, safety, visitor numbers or overall quality. The study covers only selected languages and platforms and excludes Chinese-language social data because of access and cross-border data-transfer restrictions.
