Ask anybody to name a handful of Canadian stereotypes, and “the people are friendly” is almost guaranteed to come up.
Whether or not that’s true depends on who you ask. Canada is a big country after all, with different cultures and language groups spanning coast to coast. But according to one new study, travellers visiting Montreal feel especially welcome in our neck of the woods.
Travel company Fernwayer just released its Friendliest Cities Index 2026, which ranks 200 of the world’s most popular tourist cities based on how welcoming visitors found them. Out of every Canadian city in the study, Montreal came out on top, and it wasn’t particularly close.
How Montreal stacked up
Montreal ranked 12th in the world with a friendliness score of 92.5 out of 100, making it the highest-scoring city in Canada. According to Fernwayer, 92.5% of relevant traveller comments about the city were positive.
The rest of the country didn’t fare quite as well. Quebec City placed 93rd, Vancouver landed at 170th and Toronto came in 184th, a full 172 spots behind Montreal.
To come up with the rankings, Fernwayer analyzed more than 1.2 million Reddit comments from hundreds of travel and city-focused subreddits. For each city, it compared how often people used words like “friendly,” “welcoming” and “hospitable” with words like “rude” and “hostile,” then turned the results into a score from 0 to 100.
The world’s friendliest cities
Mérida, Mexico took the top spot with a score of 95.0, followed closely by Glasgow, Scotland and Bogotá, Colombia.
Here’s the full top 10:
- Mérida, Mexico (95.0)
- Glasgow, Scotland (94.9)
- Bogotá, Colombia (94.5)
- Bodrum, Türkiye (94.4)
- Manchester, England (94.0)
- Hamburg, Germany (93.6)
- Perth, Australia (93.5)
- São Paulo, Brazil (93.3)
- Mexico City, Mexico (93.2)
- Nashville, United States (93.1)
Montreal finished just outside the top 10, ahead of cities like Chicago (19th), New Orleans (20th) and Berlin (34th).
At the other end of the list, Buenos Aires received the lowest score of all 200 cities, with Los Angeles, Madrid, Las Vegas and Paris rounding out the bottom five.
Interestingly, the study found that a country’s biggest or most-visited city usually scores the lowest, with tourist hot spots like Las Vegas and Cancún landing near the bottom too. That makes Montreal’s result stand out even more, since it’s one of Canada’s busiest tourist destinations.
Social psychologist Taylor N. West, who studies how people connect with strangers, says those brief interactions usually go better than we expect. Her advice for travellers is to ask a local about a custom or how to eat a particular dish, since “approaching these moments with genuine interest and curiosity can go a long way.”
In Montreal’s case, a “bonjour, hi” is probably a good place to start.