Holiday Extras says Sri Lanka has made the most progress to become a responsible tourist destination in the company’s third Good Trip Index.
The South Asian country jumped 34 places to 107th in the 2024 rankings, after a period of instability.
The Good Trips Index was launched in 2022 and measures human rights, animal welfare, sustainability, LGBTQ+ rights, safety of women, quality of life and press freedoms to create one index.
India is the second-fastest riser, moving up 22 spots to take the 111th place in the index, ranking highly for its quality of life. The third-fastest was Vietnam, also up 22 places to 120th.
The top place overall is taken by Switzerland, followed by Denmark and Sweden.
Popular destinations Spain and Portugal have remained consistently in the top 20 since the launch of the Good Trip Index in 2022, are currently sit 11th and 18th respectively.
Iran is at the bottom of the index, with Egypt just five places above it.
David Norris, chief growth officer, said : “Responsible and ethical considerations have now become a deciding factor for many travellers when they make their holiday decisions. And with many countries continuing to make social and environmental changes, this opens the country up to tourism, which can have a real impact on the economy as well as raising the quality of life for locals.”
The ancillaries specialist said its index is intended primarily to inform travellers from the UK heading overseas and focuses on their likely ethical concerns.
“This focus is inevitably Eurocentric, and produces results that privilege, for example, Scandinavia over sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East,” it said.
“We fully acknowledge this limitation to our approach. Other researchers may wish to choose different criteria which would be of greater value to audiences expected to have different concerns or travelling from other parts of the world.”
Picture: Sri Lanka, by Shutterstock