[regnull]

I wish there was an index where not all countries are weighted equally, but according to their desirability. Multiply each country by some factor which is defined by how many people would list it as their desirable destination. The index where France and Tuvalu are both counted equally makes no sense to me, with all due respect to the latter.

[ano-ther]

It really depends what you desire. For some it's the savoir vivre, for others it may be the lack of an extradition treaty, or the taxes.

[regnull]

While the desire itself is subjective, the question "how many people would like to visit the country X out of a million" is objective.

[throw57396]

“When a metric ceases to match a target, invent a new measure.”

with apologies to Goodhart.

[alephnerd]

I mean, a major reason the US fell in the ranks is because Brazil has stopped giving the US, Canada, and Australia visa-free access, Vietnam didn't include the US in the list of countries it chose to extend visa-free access to, Venezuela has extended visa-free access to a number of EU and EFTA members, and Papua New Guinea extended visa-free access to a number of nations recently. Also, the UK has begun enforcing the Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) on all countries excluding Ireland, which means the UK is no longer visa free.

The UK's ranking fell for similar reasons as well.

If not having visa-free access to PNG or Venezuela is a metric, it's not a fairly relevant metric, or at least a very lossy metric.

[IT4MD]

We had him over for dinner last night. He said he was find with this.

[regnull]

Here's my attempt (ChatGPT deep research). Each country is weighted by a factor derived from the tourism data:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68f00ad0-a9fc-800e-abac-584703b92a...

And the results:

Tier 1 — Global Leaders (Scores 98–100)

Singapore — 100

Germany — 99

France — 99

Italy — 99

Spain — 99

Japan — 99

South Korea — 99

Switzerland — 98

Finland — 98

Sweden — 98

Denmark — 98

Netherlands — 98

Norway — 98

Belgium — 98

Austria — 98

Ireland — 98

Portugal — 98

Greece — 98

Luxembourg — 98

Hungary — 98

Malta — 98

Liechtenstein — 98

Tier 2 — High Mobility with Minor Gaps (Scores 94–97)

Poland — 97

United Arab Emirates — 96

United States — 95

United Kingdom — 94

Canada — 94

Australia — 93

New Zealand — 93

Tier 3 — Strong Regional Power Passports (Scores 85–93)

Czech Republic — 92

Iceland — 92

Slovenia — 91

Estonia — 90

Latvia — 89

Lithuania — 89

Slovakia — 88

Chile — 87

Malaysia — 87

Israel — 86