[Yanolja Research Insight Vol. 30] Yanolja Attractiveness Index: Quantifying a city's tourism appeal through social media analysis

The Future of Tourism: From Capacity to Attractiveness

It’s time to rethink how we measure tourism competitiveness. Traditional indicators can no longer fully capture the true strength of a destination.

To address this issue, Yanolja Research has developed a new framework ‘Global Tourism City Attractiveness Index’ to capture how travelers truly perceive cities around the world.

In this issue, we explore:

✅ Why attractiveness has become the new benchmark in tourism competitiveness

✅ How this new index measures cities through the eyes of travelers

✅ Which cities ranked at the top in the 2025 Global Tourism City Attractiveness Index

💪 From Capacity to Attractiveness: Redefining the Standards of Tourism Competitiveness

For decades, tourism competitiveness has been evaluated mainly by quantitative indicators such as visitor numbers, hotel capacity, and airport size.

These metrics reveal a destination’s capacity to accommodate tourists but fail to capture why travelers choose one city over another, which is the essence of its attractiveness.

In today’s world, where social media and personalized experiences redefine the nature of travel, the gap between capacity and attractiveness keeps widening, showing why traditional indicators no longer work as they once did. 

This idea led Yanolja Research to design a new measurement tool that evaluates not how well a city prepares its infrastructure, but how attractive the city truly feels to travelers.

💖 Yanolja Attractiveness Index: Quantifying the traveler’s Heart

The Global Tourism City Attractiveness Index was jointly developed by Yanolja Research, Purdue University’s CHRIBA Research Center, and Kyung Hee University’s H&T Analytics Center.

The index consists of two key components:

• Attractiveness — how positively travelers perceive a destination
• Reputation — how widely the city is recognized among global tourists

Together, these provide a data-driven view of each city’s true competitiveness and its standing from a traveler’s perspective.

📊 Understand the Index: The 4 Dimensions of Tourism City Attractiveness

How exactly is Yanolja attractiveness Index measured? The index evaluates cities across four key dimensions:

1. Urban Aesthetics & Natural Scenery
2. Culture & History
3. Experiential Tourism Contents
4. Hospitality

Each core dimension is broken down into 2–8 sub-dimensions, weighted and aggregated to form the final attractiveness score. 

This structure allows the index to serve as a comprehensive evaluation system that quantifies the holistic value of tourism cities and enables meaningful comparisons across destinations.

🌐 2025 Global Tourism City Rankings: The Battle of Multidimensional Attractiveness  

In 2025, cities that maintained a balanced performance across the four key dimensions rose to the top of the rankings, while those relying on a single dimension fell behind.

For example, Osaka, Japan, climbed from 3rd place in 2024 to 1st overall in 2025. The city maintained its No.1 position in Experiential Content for two consecutive years and achieved strong results across other dimensions, which is the key to its success.

This shift reveals a crucial insight: a single attribute can no longer maintain global competitiveness. Instead, cities offering multi-dimensional and immersive experiences are the true winners in global tourism.

In the end, the future of tourism competitiveness is not defined by infrastructure, but by how deeply a city can resonate with travelers.

Only cities capable of designing multi-dimensional experiences will emerge as true winners on the global stage.

👉 For deeper insights, check out the full paper below. 

Vol.30 Yanolja Attractiveness Index: Measuring the Attractiveness of Global Tourism Cities

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