According to data pulled from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, London is the most photogenic destination in the world.
If you didn’t post about your vacation on social media, did you even go on vacation?
Ok ok, we know that’s a highly controversial statement to many, but the idea of documenting a vacation and sharing the photos with friends and family goes back further than the advent of Instagram. Come on, who wasn’t invited over to a friend’s house, in the ’80s or ’90s, for a projector slideshow party after that friend returned from the Grand Canyon? Now at least we get to peruse our friend’s travels from the comfort of our own homes. We can also now see which spots get the most love from travelers on vacation thanks to Money.co.uk; the company analyzed social media metrics to find the most mentioned, and most beautiful, destinations around the globe.
The financial company analyzed more than 100 popular destinations sourced from Euromonitor’s Top 100 City Destinations Index 2021 and various articles around the internet. It gave each destination a normalized score of 10, then looked at the hashtag or search term volume to find which places have the highest number of posts across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to find its final score.
So, which spot came out on top? That honor went to London, England.
“The most popular destination on all three social media platforms combined is the capital of the UK, London,” says the blog post put out by Money.co.uk, noting it scored a whopping 9.83 out of 10. “There are more than 150 million posts on Instagram mentioning the city, more than 28 billion views on TikTok, and 150,000 searches for vlogs on YouTube.”
The city also came out on top on Instagram thanks to its “iconic landmarks seemingly everywhere you turn, as well as a number of fancy bars and restaurants to explore and share with your feed.”
Other top destinations included Dubai, which ranked no. 2 overall and no. 1 on TikTok with more than 65 billion views on the platform. Paris also came in third, with an impressive score of 9.74 thanks to landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame, which are both wildly popular attractions on Instagram, alongside the ever-present cafe shot, which is always magnifique. See all the destinations that made the list, along with the full methodology of the study, here.
