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America's 'unfriendliest' cities: Arlington, Texas tops list in study based on tourist-hating tweets

Data was compiled from over 37,000 tweets about tourists from US cities

Roisin O'Connor
Thursday 03 September 2015 07:49 EDT
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When it comes to tourism, neither Britons nor Americans have the best reputation.

But a new study has revealed just how reluctant residents of some US cities are to welcome visitors who elicit varying opinions from the people who call those places home.

Charter company Stratosjets compiled Twitter data from 37,171 geotagged tweets from 1 June 2015 to 20 July 2015 that included the terms "tourist" or "tourists".

Using an AlchemyAPI sentiment analysis to judge whether the tweets were positive or negative, they were able to determine the cities that seemed most reluctant to welcome visitors.

The city of Arlington, Texas emerged as the clear "winner" of mean cities, with New York, Las Vegas, Boston, and New Orleans, rounding out the top five.

Top 10 tourist-hating cities in the US, according to Twitter

  1. Arlington, Texas
  2. New York City, New York
  3. Las Vegas, Nevada
  4. Boston, Massachusetts
  5. New Orleans, Louisiana
  6. Orlando, Florida
  7. Greensboro, North Carolina
  8. Phoenix, Arizona
  9. Los Angeles, California
  10. San Francisco, California

When international tourists visit the US, the most popular destinations are New York, Florida or California, with a combined total of 25.64 million visitors.

According to the study Chicago is the city which loves tourists the most, followed by Atalanta, Philadelphia, Miami and Portland.

Earlier this week it was revealed that Moscow, Russia, had been dubbed the unfriendliest city in the world after being found to have "unhelpful" locals and a general feeling of "aloofness" towards survey participents.

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