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.
So what’s the difference?
Awareness measures how widely a city is recognised and discussed online. It is based on the city’s 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).
But there’s an important caveat: this isn’t a ranking based on how many tourists actually visit a city.
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. Platforms and sites included Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube, Tripadvisor, Google, Booking.com, Agoda and Trip.com.
News and broadcast content were excluded, while 419 tourism-related keywords across 17 sub-categories were used to identify relevant discussions. An AI-based sentiment-analysis model then classified mentions as positive, neutral or negative.
That means the index is really measuring how visible a destination is online and how positively it is discussed, rather than providing a definitive score for things such as infrastructure, affordability, safety, visitor numbers or overall quality.
There are other limitations, too. The study covers only selected languages and platforms and excludes Chinese-language social data because of access and cross-border data-transfer restrictions. The report also does not disclose the total number of posts, accounts or individual travellers analysed.
Still, Bangkok’s strong showing offers an interesting snapshot of how the city is being talked about by travellers online — and what seems to be drawing their attention.
The full 2026 Yanolja Attractiveness Index report and its methodology are available on Yanolja Research’s website.
