According to Serbian Economist, Budapest, Hungary, ranked first in Radical Storage’s list of the world’s dirtiest cities, compiled based on an analysis of tourist reviews of the cleanliness of popular attractions in 100 major tourist destinations.
According to the study, 37.9% of reviews mentioning cleanliness in Budapest were negative, which was the worst result among all cities surveyed. Rome (35.7% negative reviews), Las Vegas (31.6%), Florence (29.6%), and Paris (28.2%) followed.
The top 20 cities perceived as the dirtiest by tourists also included Milan, Verona, Frankfurt, Brussels, Cairo, Heraklion, New York, Barcelona, Johor Bahru, Seville, San Francisco, Miami, Hyderabad, London, and Osaka. In all these cities, the share of negative reviews about cleanliness ranges from 15.6% to 26.8%.
The authors of the study note that the most criticism for cleanliness is received by mass tourist centers with historic centers and high loads on urban infrastructure. In the case of Budapest, one possible reason is that the waste management system has not been able to keep up with the growth in tourist traffic, which, according to Etias, increased by 8.3% in Hungary in September 2025 and by 12% in the capital itself compared to the same month in 2024.
Radical Storage emphasizes that the rating reflects not objective sanitary indicators, but rather the subjective perception of cleanliness by tourists, as recorded in English-language Google reviews of key attractions in the 100 leading cities in the world according to the Euromonitor index.
