The cold Hanseatic city of Hamburg ranks among the world’s most welcoming, according to an analysis of online comments by travellers.
Germany can be a great place to live, and also to visit, but it doesn’t necessarily rank highly when it comes to friendliness.
In fact, not too long ago an “Expat City Ranking” by InterNations called out five German cities as being among the “least welcoming” in the world.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Hamburg was named among the top friendliest cities in the world in a recent list based on an analysis of online comments.
The same ranking also puts the notoriously cold city in the north well ahead of other German tourist destinations, like Berlin or Munich, for friendliness.
The ranking was put together by Fernwayer, an online platform for booking travel experiences. The platform takes its name from the German word Fernweh, which means a longing for distant places.
The research, which included 200 cities, is based on an analysis of 1.2 million Reddit comments taken from posts on travel and city-focused subreddits. For each city, the percentage of positive comments were weighed against the percentage of negative comments to arrive at a “friendliness score”.
How Germany’s big cities compare
Hamburg was the only German city to make it anywhere near the top of the list – ranking as the 6th friendliest of the 200 cities assessed worldwide.
The authors note that as opposed to northern Germany’s “reputation for reserve”, many commenters found the people in Hamburg to be “very open minded, tolerant and welcoming to foreigners”.
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Other German cities included were Berlin, which took the 34th spot, Frankfurt (69th), Cologne (77th) and Munich (102nd).
Looking just at the European cities that topped the list, Glasgow and Manchester took the top spots.
They were followed by Hamburg and Vienna, which were the only German-speaking cities to make it into Europe’s top 10.
Rankings in disagreement
While none of the rest of Germany’s big cities were ranked particularly high, it’s interesting to see that almost all of them made at least to the upper half of the list.
This seems to stand in contrast to the aforementioned “Expat City Ranking” from 2024, which had all of the above cities grouped at the bottom of the list for friendliness. Notably that ranking had Hamburg in 52nd place out of 53 cities – effectively marking it as the second most ‘unfriendly’ city.
The one place that the two rankings are in agreement is in putting Munich at the bottom of the list among the German cities, suggesting that it may be the least welcoming city for visitors in the country. Readers of The Local largely disagreed with that notion when we put out our own survey on the matter.
How friendly is Hamburg for residents?
One point worth noting here is that being welcoming to visitors and being welcoming to foreign residents are two different things, and they don’t always align.
While tourists in Hamburg seem to have found the people they met to be welcoming overall, people who have recently moved to the city to try and settle down might have another experience.
As Local columnist, and long-time Hamburg resident, Brian Melican puts it: “Hamburgers are still guarded, reserved, and sometimes awkward.”
He adds that the city’s people are “not unfriendly” but that they “just have trouble showing it sometimes.”
OPINION: Yes you can make local friends in Hamburg, here’s how
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thelocal.de
