MANILA, Philippines — Online guide SchengenVisaInfo, which assists individuals with information regarding the European Schengen visa, listed the top countries in the continent to visit during summertime this year.
Dubbing it the Europe Summer Tourism Index, SchengenVisaInfo ranked countries based on six factors: beaches, summer trend popularity, average weekly cost of travel, average temperature, cuisine, and friendliness of locals.
Topping the index with a 10/10 was Spain with perfect scores for beaches and summer trend popularity, and nearly perfect scores for the friendliness of locals and its cuisine.
The average cost for traveling to Spain is €1,056 (P66,250), which is roughly the average of the costs of countries inside the Top 10.
Second and third-ranked Italy and Greece both garnered nearly perfect scores like Spain, while fourth-ranked Türkiye was brought down by a 0.46 on its score on friendliness of locals.
Completing the Top 5 was Portugal, whose higher scores were for the friendliness of locals and its cuisine. The average cost for traveling to Portugal is €954 (less than P60,000).
Seventh-ranked Montenegro score the lowest friendliness of locals (0.25) in the Top 10, but it has the cheapest travel average cost at €729 (P45,700).
Meanwhile, 10th-placed Malta had the lowest beach score, summer trend popularity score, and culinary score for countries in the Top 10, even scoring zero for the latter.
SchengenVisaInfo noted that Ukraine was excluded from the index because of the ongoing war in the country.
RELATED: Philippines in top 5: Europeans eyeing Asian destinations for summer vacation