For most of the past decade, the world's most-visited city has not been Paris, London, or New York — it has been Bangkok, which topped the Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index in six of seven years through 2018 and hosted more international overnight visitors annually than any other city on Earth

The single most-visited city on Earth for the entire second half of the 2010s was not Paris, London, or New York — and most travellers who assumed it was any of the three were wrong by tens of millions of annual arrivals. The gap between popular Western assumptions about global tourism and the actual data is, in essential respects, substantially large. As reported in Forbes’ 2019 coverage of the Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index and its ranking of the world’s leading tourism destinations, the Mastercard Index’s methodology — which counted only international overnight visitors (excluding domestic tourists, day-trippers, and business travellers who did not spend a night in the destination city) — had established Bangkok as the world’s leading destination in 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2018, with the intervening years of 2014 and 2015 having been won by London and Bangkok respectively in a period of tight competition among the top three cities. New York, the only North American city in the Mastercard top ten, ranked seventh with approximately 13.6 million international overnight visitors — approximately 40 percent fewer than Bangkok. The specific ranking of “Bangkok as the world’s most-visited city” was not an anomaly. It was, across essentially the entire post-2013 period of Mastercard’s tracking, the dominant pattern.

The specific reasons for Bangkok’s dominance are, per the accumulated tourism-industry analysis of the past decade, substantially structural rather than accidental. According to Mastercard’s own official 2019 Global Destination Cities Index publication and the ten years of accumulated data underlying it, the substantive drivers of Bangkok’s positioning at the top of the ranking are: geographic centrality within the broader Southeast Asian tourism circuit (Bangkok’s location makes it the natural international gateway for travellers subsequently visiting Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand’s own southern beach destinations); the substantially lower cost of accommodation, food, and local transportation compared to the equivalent-quality Western European or North American alternatives; the well-developed English-language capacity of the Thai tourism workforce; the substantial airport infrastructure at Suvarnabhumi International (opened 2006, current capacity approximately 65 million passengers per year) and Don Mueang International (the older secondary airport, now the region’s primary budget carrier hub); the concentration of major tourism attractions (the Grand Palace, Wat Arun, Wat Phra Kaew, Chatuchak Weekend Market, Khao San Road) within a relatively compact central district; and the substantial reputation of Thai cuisine — particularly Bangkok’s street food scene, which the UNESCO Creative Cities Network has recognised as a distinct cultural asset — as one of the more attractive gastronomic destinations in contemporary global tourism.

What happened during and after the pandemic

The Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index was, in essential respects, a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mastercard released its final annual report in September 2019 (covering 2018 data), and the subsequent global collapse of international tourism across 2020-2022 — during which Bangkok’s annual international visitor volume dropped from approximately 22 million to approximately 3 million (2020) and progressively recovered across the subsequent two years — made the continuation of the annual index methodologically difficult. The ranking authority for global tourism destination rankings has, in the post-pandemic period, effectively transferred to the London-based market research firm Euromonitor International, which produces its own annual Top 100 City Destinations Index using a broader methodology (visitor volume, spending, safety, infrastructure, sustainability, economic activity) that includes but is not limited to the specific international overnight visitor metric that Mastercard had emphasised.

The transfer of ranking authority did not, however, change the substantive outcome. As reported in Khaosod English’s coverage of the 2025 Euromonitor Top 100 City Destinations Index, Bangkok retained its position as the world’s most-visited city in 2023, 2024, and 2025 across essentially the entire post-pandemic recovery period, welcoming approximately 30.3 million international arrivals in 2025 — a substantially higher figure than either the pre-pandemic Mastercard peaks of approximately 22 million or the corresponding 2025 visitor volumes for Hong Kong, London, Paris, or any other Euromonitor top-ten city. The specific pattern of Bangkok’s dominance — well-established under the Mastercard methodology across 2013-2018, briefly interrupted by the pandemic collapse of 2020-2022, and re-established under the Euromonitor methodology across 2023-2025 — represents, in essential respects, the most substantially consistent single-city dominance of the global international tourism industry across the past decade and a half.

The costs of being visited

The consequences of Bangkok’s tourism dominance are, by every available account of contemporary Thai urban policy, substantially non-trivial. Per Nation Thailand’s coverage of the 2025 Euromonitor ranking and the broader challenges facing Bangkok’s tourism sector, the substantial concentration of tourism in central Bangkok has produced traffic congestion levels that regularly rank among the ten worst globally, PM2.5 particulate pollution that regularly exceeds the World Health Organization’s safe-exposure thresholds by factors of five or more during the December-February dry season, substantial pressure on the city’s limited freshwater supply, progressive erosion of the cultural sites (particularly the temple complexes) that constitute the primary tourism draw, and a well-documented pattern of tourism-associated economic and social pathologies — the sex tourism industry, the recurring cycles of tourist scams, the substantial informal economy of unlicensed guides and unregulated street vendors — that no Thai government of the past three decades has successfully addressed. Bangkok itself sits on the Chao Phraya delta approximately 1.5 metres above current sea level, is sinking at approximately 2 centimetres per year due to groundwater extraction, and faces the substantial medium-term risk of partial submergence by the 2050s. The single most-visited city in the recorded history of modern international tourism is, in essential respects, a city whose long-term physical existence at the current geographic coordinates is not entirely certain — and whose current tourism dominance has been substantially built on the accumulated infrastructure of a Thai state that has, across the past four decades, prioritised short-term tourism revenue over the long-term sustainability of the specific urban environment that produces it.