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The research analyzed more than 70,000 online reviews covering the top 100 city destinations worldwide, scanning for words such as “clean” and “dirty” to assess how often visitors praised or criticized each city’s cleanliness. The cities were selected from Euromonitor’s Top 100 City Destinations Index, and for each location, the top 10 tourist attractions were examined based on Google reviews posted between October 2024 and November 2025.
Budapest ranked last in the survey, with nearly 37.9% of cleanliness-related reviews describing the Hungarian capital as dirty. According to the study, perceptions of low cleanliness may stem from pressure on the city’s waste management system amid rising visitor numbers. Hungary’s tourism sector expanded by 8.3% in September 2025 compared with a year earlier, while Budapest alone recorded a 12% increase over the same period, the research noted.
Following Budapest on the list of dirtiest cities were Rome at 35.7%, Las Vegas at 31.6%, Florence at 29.6%, and Paris at 28.2%.
At the other end of the ranking, Kraków was named the cleanest city in the world, with 98.5% of cleanliness-related reviews praising its tidiness. Sharjah also scored 98.5%, followed by Singapore at 98%, Warsaw at 97.8%, and Doha at 97.4%.
Poland performed particularly well, with both Kraków and Warsaw placing in the global top five for cleanliness. The study also found that historic city centers appear to face greater challenges in maintaining perceptions of cleanliness, with cities such as Rome, Florence and Paris described as dirty by more than 28% of reviewers.
Researchers said the dataset provides a broad snapshot of traveler perceptions, focusing on attractions most frequently visited by tourists in each city.
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