"...the pandemic and its aftermath have also created a rare openness to doing things differently. Seizing this opportunity won’t be easy, or a short-term affair. But if we can be certain of anything, it’s that cities will adapt and evolve, and that they have the potential to come back stronger."

- Kearney 2020 Global Cities Report

The Kearney 2020 Global Cities Report is out and it incorporates two main rankings: their Global Cities Index (GCI) and their Global Cities Outlook (GCO).

The former is intended to be a snapshot of where things stand today and the latter is intended to be a forecast of where things might be heading.

Here's their GCI:

And here's their GCO:

Note: The big mover in their GCO is Toronto, jumping nine spots to take second place behind London.

The full report can be downloaded over here.

Airbnb's IPO documents recently went public.

Not surprisingly, their business as a travel company has been heavily impacted by COVID-19. Last year, the platform saw 326.9 million nights and experiences booked, with 251.1 million being booked in the first nine months of 2019. This year, nights and experiences are down to 146.9 million for this same nine month period. Revenue is correspondingly down from $3.7 billion for the first nine months of 2019, to $2.5 billion for the first nine months of this year.

But what is also clear from their data is that people still really want to travel and have new experiences. As soon as April passed and the Northern Hemisphere entered the normally busy Q3 travel season, domestic travel began to quickly ramp back up. For many, this likely took the place of international travel. See above chart.

Of greater concern might be all of the regulation that now surrounds short-term rentals. As of October 2019, about 70% of the platform's top 200 cities (by revenue) had some form of regulation impacting short-term rentals. But at the same time, no one city accounts for more than 2.5% of the platform's revenue. So there's strong geographic diversification.

If you'd like to take a look at the company's S-1, you can do that over here. And for those of you who might be curious, these are Airbnb's top 10 cities based on revenue:

1. London

2. New York City

3. Paris

4. Los Angeles

5. Rome

6. Barcelona

7. Tokyo

8. Toronto

9. San Diego

10. Lisbon

Whenever you see a best-of-anything ranking, you should probably ask yourself what the hell "best" even means. In this case, Resonance Consultancy is ranking the world's cities based on six alliterative categories: place, people, programming, product, prosperity, and promotion.

Some of these metrics are qualitative, but many are, in fact, quantitative. Number of COVID-19 infections in 2020; number of direct destinations served by the city's airports; number of foreign-born residents; number of top-rated restaurants (TripAdvisor); most Instagram check-ins, and so on.

The result is this list of the world's best cities:

1. London

2. New York

3. Paris

4. Moscow

5. Tokyo

6. Dubai

7. Singapore

8. Barcelona

9. Los Angeles

10. Madrid

11. Rome

12. Chicago

13. Toronto

14. San Francisco

15. Abu Dhabi

I arbitrarily chose the top 15 cities in order to make sure that Toronto was included in this ranking. If you'd like to download a full copy of the 2021 World's Best Cities report, you can do that over here. I recommend you check out their performance criteria.

Toronto, for example, performs very well when it comes to "people." That's fairly consistent across most of these rankings. But it didn't fare so well when it comes to "place." That category includes things like the average number of sunny days and the number of high quality sights & landmarks.