Siem Reap's Best City Award

[PHNOM PENH POST]

FOR the first time, Siem Reap has been listed as one of the world’s best cities, according to influential US travel magazine Travel + Leisure.

The magazine’s World’s Best 2011 Awards issue will be published on July 22, based on the votes of thousands of Travel + Leisure readers who nominated various cities from around the world.

In this year’s listings, Siem Reap ranks as the world’s seventh-best city, one spot above Australia’s Sydney, which came in at number eight on the list.
Bangkok, for the second year in a row, was again voted as the world’s best city, a listing which caused some controversy last year when the Thai capital came in on top.

The complete list reads as this: 1. Bangkok, Thailand; 2. Florence, Italy; 3. Rome, Italy; 4. New York City, US; 5. Istanbul, Turkey; 6. Cape Town, South Africa; 7. Siem Reap, Cambodia; 8. Sydney, Australia; 9. Barcelona, Spain; 10. Paris, France.

Meanwhile, in mid June, the website CraveOnline, which claims to be “the source for all of the entertainment needs that young men have”, ran a feature on the most underrated vacation cities, revealing “four unique places to visit before everyone else discovers them”. And the site, which claims 26 million unique visitors every month, awarded the number-one slot to Siem Reap. The other three cities were Guayaquil, Ecuador; Merida, Mexico; and Riga, Latvia.