Have a good trip with the Good Trip Index
The Holiday Extras guide to travelling ethically, sustainably and well. This is the Good Trip Index - updated for 2024.
Travel sustainably. Leave only footprints. Support local businesses in the country you visit.
But make sure those local businesses are kind to their animals and pay a living wage to their employees. Try not to support oppressive regimes, and before you go check the country's record on press freedoms, LGBTQI+ rights, the rights of women and sustainability…
It's a lot to remember. Choosing to travel well is hard, and a holiday shouldn't be a chore. But for many of us, it's worth a little extra effort to travel responsibly.
So to help make travelling responsibly less of a hassle, we pulled together seven of the definitive country-level indices that cover the main ethical issues UK holidaymakers told us were important to them when deciding where to go on holiday*. Sustainable travel. Human rights, with a separate index for both women's rights and LGBTQI+ rights. Press freedom. Animal welfare. And wellbeing and quality of life in the country.
The Good Trip Index 2024
Taken together, our meta-index produces one simple list which you can refer to when picking a destination – without having to trawl through dozens of different sources when you should be taking a break.
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Last year's index
This is the third year for our Good Trips Index, so see below for last year's numbers and how things have changed since 2023.
Good Trips Index 2023Top destinations to have a good trip
1. Switzerland | Great for human rights, LGBT travel, animal welfare and quality of life
2. Denmark | Great for quality of life and press freedom
Copenhagen travel guide
3. Sweden | Best for sustainability and animal welfare
Sweden travel guide
4. Norway | Best for press freedom
Norway travel guide
5. Finland | Great for sustainability
Finland travel guide
6. Iceland | Great for quality of life
Iceland travel guide
7. New Zealand | Best for LGBT travel
8. Ireland | Good for human rights and press freedom
Ireland travel guide
9. Netherlands | Good for press freedom
Amsterdam travel guide
10. Estonia | Great for sustainability
How did we make the Good Trip Index?
To compile our meta-index we have used seven different pieces of original research from seven different sources. The sources are deliberately chosen to offer a variety of political perspectives.
- "Top Countries for Sustainable Tourism", Market research provider, Euromonitor International, March 2021
- "Freedom Index by Country", World Population Review, 2024
- "Women, Peace and Security Index", Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, 2023
- "World Press Freedom Index", Reporters Without Borders, 2024
- "Quality of Life Index", Numbeo, 2024
- "Gay Travel Index", Spartacus, 2024
- "Voiceless Animal Cruelty Index", undated
We have made reasonable efforts to check the completeness and validity of each source index. Some countries were missing from one or more source index. Where a country was missing from three or more, we omitted that country from consideration entirely. Where fewer data points were missing, we used the average for that dimension. Inevitably, this will create discrepancies, and regrettably disadvantage smaller and poorer countries that were overlooked by one or more of the original sources, but the alternative would be to exclude a large number of countries, primarily outside Western Europe and North America, which would be problematic in different ways.
Our index is intended primarily to inform travellers from the United Kingdom heading overseas, and is therefore focussed on what our research tells us are likely to be their ethical concerns about the countries they may choose to visit. This focus is inevitably Eurocentric, and produces results that privilege, for example, Scandinavia over sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. We fully acknowledge this limitation to our approach. Other researchers may wish to choose different criteria which would be of greater value to audiences expected to have different concerns or travelling from other parts of the world.
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