As the world cup continues in the home of the Red Square, it has emerged from a new report that Russian tourists are the world’s happiest tourists.
According to a report from Rewardexpert.com, which reviews airline and travel rewards credit cards, Russian’s are not the most easygoing because they hand out the most four or five-star reviews but because they are the least likely to leave one or two-star reviews.
Russia took first place for being home to the world’s happiest tourists. Five-star reviews made up an impressively high 46.16 percent of 70,775 reviews, but this alone would only have had Russia ranked sixth place.
Even including the 36.61 percent of reviews with four-star ratings, for a total 82.77 percent positive reviews, it wasn’t quite enough for Russia to rank number one.
What put Russia over the top was the fact that it ranked dead last for grumpy, one and two-star reviews, with a shockingly low 4.99 percent of reviews that rated their stay one or two stars.
Serbians and Lebanese travelers also emerged relatively easy to please in the ranking, taking second and third spots on the list of happiest travelers.
For the report, researchers from Rewardexpert.com combed through 3.5 million reviews written from guests in 83 countries, for 13,410 hotels in 70 countries. The website began their research by sending through the questions: RewardExpert set out to answer both questions: which countries do the world’s grumpiest travelers call home, and which countries are home to the happiest?
"We used the subset of reviews with five-star ratings, 1,384,241 in all, to measure raw happiness. We calculated an average of these two, as a percentage of all reviews by visitors from each country of origin, in order to rank them on a scale from “grumpy” to “happy”, the website explained in their report.
The top ten countries with the grumpiest travelers are: Spain, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Bulgaria, Zimbabwe, Denmark, Turkey, Iran and Lithuania.
The top ten countries that are home to the happiest travelers are: Russia, Serbia, Lebanon, Australia, Belarus, Israel, Georgia, United States, Jordan and Colombia.