Compared to the previous year, Prague improved its position by two places and moved up from 13th place just beyond the top ten. It ranked ninth in the competition of European cities.
Prague ranked eleventh in Euromonitor International’s global Top 100 City Destinations Index 2022. Compared to the previous year, Prague improved its position by two places and moved up from 13th place just beyond the top ten. It ranked ninth in the competition of European cities.
Euromonitor has updated the Top 100 City Destinations Index criteria in 2021 to meet the up-to-date requirements of tourism stakeholders to identify cities with strong investment potential and growth opportunities. The ranking compares world destinations based on 57 different criteria across six key pillars: economy and trade, health and safety, tourism infrastructure, policy and attractiveness, tourism performance and sustainability.
6 million tourists arrived in Prague in 2022
The fact that Prague with its 2022 results overtook such well-known destinations as Vienna and Tokyo is undoubtedly due to its progress in several analyzed categories, such as tourism performance. According to data from the Czech Statistical Office, almost 6 million tourists arrived in Prague in 2022, which is up to 2.5 times the performance in previous “covid” years. This performance corresponds to approximately 75% of the number of visitors in 2019. However, the revival of tourism in Prague did not affect only its leisure sector. Once the restrictions on group events had been lifted, the professional conferences and congresses returned to the Czech capital city.
As for the factor with the greatest weight – tourism infrastructure, the number of passengers who checked in at the Václav Havel Airport in 2022 is an illustration of its consistent recovery trend: 10.7 million is 2.4 times the number of passengers in 2021, but it is still only 60% of passengers in 2019. The expected development with the announced launch of new routes and the expansion of those already established could increase the number of handled passengers closer towards the pre-pandemic performance by another 2 million in 2023. The prospects for growth in the capacities of Prague’s high-end category hotels are similarly optimistic: by the end of 2024, the capacities should expand by almost 2,000 rooms planned. In most hotels, new meeting rooms should be added to the new rooms too.
Sustainability, infrastructure, and attractiveness ranked the highest
With almost 50% of the urban area covered with greenery, Prague regularly ranks among the greenest capitals in European and global rankings, landing a high score in the health and safety rating of the destination. The capital of the Czech Republic scores similarly in the sustainability pillar, for example with the area of its urban conservation zone, which is recorded in the UNESCO World Heritage List, and which occupies 1.75% of the total area of the city.
The fact that Prague is not only an attractive city for investment and business but is also seen and assessed very flatteringly by its own inhabitants shows the result of a survey conducted by well-known British Time Out magazine: the city residents and Time Out editors and contributors raised Prague to the sixth place among 331 world urban centres in 2022. They most appreciated the qualities of their capital city within the same or similar criteria groups as those included in the Euromonitor index: safety and health, sustainability, infrastructure, and attractiveness.
Paris dominates Euromonitor’s Top 100 City Destinations for 2022, followed by Dubai and Amsterdam. At the end of the top ten – just one place ahead of Prague – is New York. The consistent trend of a gradually growing number of Czech capital visitors in both the leisure and congress segments proves that its offer is far from losing its attractiveness. At the same time, it suggests that in the coming years, Prague could aim for higher goals in the global rankings again.
Source: Prague Convention Bureau
