After a very long year or two, many of us want nothing more than to let loose, unwind, and party like it’s 2019.
Maybe you’ve been missing the dance floor, getting your boogie on with your mates, diving into the mosh pit, or getting lost in a crowd lit purely by strobe lights. Perhaps you’re reminiscing about nights at the casino, pulling one-armed bandits or dominating the poker table while sipping on a few gins.
Whether you’re craving a cocktail bar or dreaming of a jazz club, we all need to get out more!
With that in mind, the past couple of years have also left us starved of travel opportunities. With many holidays having been cancelled or delayed, the need to get out and experience new places has got many of us itching to get away.
As we’ve all been staying home, and may not have been able to have a proper holiday abroad in a long time, we thought we’d combine the two to find the best party cities across the globe.
Having looked at multiple factors to get an idea of each city’s opportunity to party, we’ve created a list of the best party cities in the world.
Check out our leaderboard below to start planning your next crazy adventure
While all the cities on our list make for a great party experience, these five destinations claimed the top spots when directly compared.
In first place is the world-renowned Las Vegas, with a party score of 8.75. This incredibly high score has been well earned, just as Vegas’ party credentials have earned it numerous nicknames from Sin City to America’s Playground, with the city often being referred to as the Capital of the World for gambling, marriage and entertainment. The saying “What...
In second place with a party score of 6.12 is New Orleans. Home to the world-famous Mardi Gras Carnival and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, New Orleans is a cultural melting pot with music at its heart. A 2009 poll by Travel + Leisure ranked New Orleans as the best US city for wild weekends, spring break, cocktail hours, live music, and ...
The capital of the Czech Republic, Prague has many reasons to visit and attracts tourists from all over the world. Prague is famous for its architecture, its history, and its beer, making it the ideal location for those who want to absorb some culture during the day and party well into the night. In 2016, Prague was named the 6th best destination in the world in a ranking...
Located on America’s west coast, in California, San Francisco is a great place to party. You can take in the sights of the city’s iconic steep streets, the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz during the day, and party well into the night. Known for its liberal culture and progressive attitude, San Francisco is a great LGBTQ+ destination, and is even sometimes referred to ...
Renowned as being one of the world’s best party cities, Amsterdam takes fifth place with a party score of 5.15. Home to the Heineken brewery, this city is a great place for beer drinkers, while relaxed attitudes to marijuana mean you can enjoy a different type of intoxication in one of the city’s many specialised “coffeeshops” where this drug can be smoked legally...
|
Rank |
City |
Country |
|
|
|
|
Score |
|---|
We wanted to find out which cities in the world are the best destinations for partying. To do this, we scoured the internet for articles, lists and sources that promoted different cities as being great for partying. We compiled this list of cities and picked several factors to measure them by. These included the legality of marijuana in each city (taken from Wikipedia), the number of nightlife venues listed on Tripadvisor, the number of budget hotels listed on Tripadvisor, and the number of casinos in each city (World Casino Directory).
We then calculated the rates per 100,000 people for nightlife venues, budget hotels and casinos using population data from World Population Review. This made the numbers for each city comparable, so we could use them when formulating the overall party score. To turn the legality of marijuana into a usable score, we attributed each level of legality a score from 1 to 4. If marijuana was legal we gave the city 4 points, we gave 3 points for decriminalisation, 2 points for only medicinal use, and 1 point for illegality.
Cities that scored 0 or close to 0 for these factors were removed, as they would populate the bottom of the results table due to data that was probably incomplete and not representative of the city. We also removed cities that had a population of less than 100,000 people.
Now that we had all four metrics in a usable condition, we combined them in a formula that gave casinos, budget hotels and marijuana laws equal weighting, while giving nightlife scores a weighting of 1.5 in comparison. This is because nightlife is usually the common denominator for any party city, whereas people are more likely to differ in their wants and needs when it comes to accommodation, casinos and drug use.
