Pride Month European Index 2022
These are the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in Europe 2022
Pride Month is characterised by many celebrations and events, of which the Pride parades are particularly noteworthy. So if you decide to go on a city break this summer and would like to take the opportunity to attend one of the Pride events, you can find inspiration in Holidu’s latest study. The data collected should help you get a better idea of the ease to reach the respective cities, what costs can be expected, how big the offer for the LGBTQ community is and how progressive the respective country is in terms of legislation.
LGBTQ by Stavrialena Gontzo via Unsplash
Most LGBTQ-friendly cities in Europe
1. London – Overall Score: 38.67
The UK’s capital London took first place this year with an overall score of 38.67, making it the most LGBTQ-friendly city in Europe. In the category of Instagram hashtags as well as “LGBTQ-friendly bars”, London achieved the maximum score of 10. In terms of equality, the UK is already very progressive in a Europe-wide comparison with a score of 8.2. The metropolis is also a pioneer in terms of accessibility and achieved a score of 9.12. The only drawback is the price of accommodation per night: with an average of 289 euros per night, visitors have to dig deep into their pockets for their stay. On Saturday, 2 July 2022, the big Pride parade will take place in London, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in the UK this year.
Most LGBTQ-friendly cities in the UK
Methodology
The ranking was created by Holidu, the search engine for holiday homes. For the data collection, the most populous as well as the most relevant cities for the LGBTQI+ scene in Europe were considered. The data was extracted between April and May 2022.
After gathering the raw data, each data point was given a numerical value between 0 and 10, with 0 being the lowest data point in the range and 10 representing the highest. This process was then conducted for each of the 5 categories, making 50 the maximum score that could be achieved. The following equation was then used to assign each data point representative scores between 0 and 10:
Score(i) = ( x(i) * 10 ) / x(max)
LGBTQ-friendly Bars: How LGBTQI+ friendly is the city? To answer this question the number of gay-friendly bars for each city was searched on google maps and scored according to the above mentioned equation (e.g. city with the highest number was awarded with score of 10 whereas the remaining cities obtained scores calculated by the equation above).
Instagram-Hashtags: How big is the pride in each city? For this purpose, the hashtags associated with “pride“ for each city were investigated. The keyword “pride” was researched in combination with the English and local city name as well as any other keyword, which social media user tend to refer to prides with (e.g. “csd” in Germany, “gaypride” in France, “orgullo” in Spain). Hashtags containing years were not considered. The final selection of hashtags was based on the two mostly used hashtags for each city pride.
Accessibility: How easy is it to reach each city? In order to answer this question, the number of all the available connections with buses, trains and flights among the selected cities in both directions was examined. The city with the highest number of connections obtained a maximum score of 10 while the rest of the cities received scores based on the general equation.
Accommodation Price: How affordable is to pay for accommodation in each city? To answer this question, Holidu’s database was used to find the median price per night from 13.06.-19.06.2022 in each of the 118 considered cities. For the calculation of this score the city with the lowest prices was scored with 10 while the rest of the cities received a representative score based on the mentioned equation.
LGBTQ-Equality Index: For this data point, the so-called “LGBTQ Equality Index” from www.equaldex.com was used, which measures the current state of LGBTQ rights, laws and freedoms in each country as well as public attitudes towards LGBTQ supporters. For this factor we did not use the above mentioned equation but, since Equaldex considered 100 as maximum reachable score, we just made this maximum reachable score to 10 by dividing each Equaldex Country score by 10.