Capital in top 10 of ‘world’s most crowded tourist cities’
Edinburgh has been named in the top 10 of the world’s most overcrowded tourist cities by a global car rental comparison site which compared the number of visitors to the number of locals in cities around the world.
DiscoverCars.com has created the ranking after looking into how many tourists are visiting these popular cities per 100 locals.
They used Euromonitor’s Top 100 City Destinations 2025 report to select the cities covered, and used government sources like tourism portals or city websites to find their population data.
DiscoverCars.com then compared this to the number of international tourists who visited in 2025, using data sourced from Euromonitor.
The company ranked the cities in order of the highest or lowest number of tourists compared to the number of people who live there, separating the data out into three lists: all cities worldwide, European cities only, and American cities only.
Edinburgh earned ninth place on the list. In order, the most visited cities on the list are: Dubrovnik in Croatia, Reykjavik in Iceland, Venice in Italy, Geneva in Switzerland, Porto in Portugal, Phuket in Thailand, Florence in Italy, Lisbon in Portugal, Edinburgh in Scotland, and Athens in Greece.
Aleksandrs Buraks, head of growth at DiscoverCars.com, said: “Our ranking of the cities that attract the most and least tourists compared to local residents is a fantastic source of inspiration for any upcoming holidays.
“Although it’s important to say, just because a city has fewer tourists doesn’t mean it will be a quieter trip – on the contrary, the cities that have the highest number of locals compared to visitors are some of the biggest in the world!
“Cairo, Jakarta and all the other destinations in our top five cities with a lower proportion of tourists have more than 22 million residents.”