According to a study comparing cleanliness in 14 different Nordic and Baltic cities, undertaken last summer by Denmark’s Wonderful Copenhagen marketing office, foreign tourists determined that Reykjavík was the cleanest of them all.
The purpose of the study, which is part of a larger project called “Experience Design in City Tourism,” was to investigate what kind of expectations tourists have towards the cities they visit in terms of original experiences and how that affects marketing strategies for the cities.
Visit Reykjavík, the marketing office for Reykjavík, represents the city in the project.
During the execution of the study, 5,000 tourists were interviewed at information centers and asked about their expectations to the city they were visiting. Once they had returned to their home countries, they filled out a questionnaire about their experience, including cleanliness. The tourists gave each city points on a scale of 0 to 100.
In terms of cleanliness, Reykjavík was given 78 points on average. Tourists visiting Reykjavík had both expected that the city would be clean, and, after visiting, they found that the city had been even cleaner than they expected.
Visit Reykjavík celebrates the results of the study.
Most tourists found that Copenhagen lacked cleanliness. The city only received 58 points on average and ranked last. The other cities that were evaluated were Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Aarhus, Malmö, Uppsala, Bergen, Tampere and Turku.
In the study tourists were also asked to rank each city in terms of which was the most romantic, expensive, cultural, modern, most fascinating, historic, smallest, greenest, most unique and most eventful.
Results from that comparison will be introduced early next year.
