If you’re often worried about safety when you travel, you might want to know that Finland is the safest country in the world, according to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) latest biennial Travel and Tourism report.
In the report, the WEF creates rankings for various countries, taking into account the “costliness of common crime and violence, as well as terrorism, and the extent to which police services can be relied upon to provide protection from crime”. Finland scored a safety rating of 6.7.
Closely following Finland were Qatar and the UAE, which received ratings of 6.61 and 6.6 respectively. Iceland and Austria rounded off the top five.
However, it should be noted that the 20 safest countries in the report all scored a rating of above 6, meaning that travel to any one of them should be reasonably safe. New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia all garnered pretty solid ratings, meaning that, if you’re planning a holiday to any of these places, you shouldn’t have to worry about anything.
See the full top 20 list at the bottom of this article.
Conversely, countries you may think are quite safe actually scored pretty badly in the WEF’s report. The United Kingdom, for example, came 63rd in the rankings, below Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan and Rwanda. And the United States was even worse, ranking 73rd on the list, behind Albania and Kazakhstan.
If you want to know where to avoid completely, though, head to the bottom of the list, where you’ll see Nigeria, Colombia, Yemen, Pakistan and Venezuela. Also worth noting is the fact that Thailand made the bottom 10. See the full list below.
World’s safest countries
1 – Finland
2 – Qatar
3 – UAE
4 – Iceland
5 – Austria
6 – Luxembourg
7 – New Zealand
8 – Singapore
9 – Oman
10 – Portugal
11 – Switzerland
12 – Hong Kong
13 – Australia
14 – Slovenia
15 – Ireland
16 – Belgium
17 – Netherlands
18 – Norway
19 – Sweden
20 – Germany
World’s most unsafe countries
1 – Nigeria
2 – Colombia
3 – Yemen
4 – Pakistan
5 – Venezuela
6 – Egypt
7 – Guatemala
8 – El Salvador
9 – Honduras
10 – Thailand
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