"These Leading Places are the 100 most loved destinations in 2021 according to what people really feel. No one has paid to be named. No surveys have suggested an answer. Word of mouth built this list, unprompted and unbiased. Each of these 100 destinations has earned the love and an impressive Tourism Sentiment Score® during one of the toughest years the tourism industry has faced. They are Leading Places, and that's worth celebrating.
To be able to name the top 100, we kicked off 2022 with an intensive study of our Tourism Sentiment Index data -- that's 1.6 billion online conversations and content pieces publicly available about 21,330 global destinations. Tourism Sentiment Index is cutting-edge technology that applies the power of artificial intelligence to the challenge of deciphering sentiment from human expression.
Our technology in the hands of our talented data scientists has brought to life a novel metric for destination marketing: Tourism Sentiment Score®. This is the metric that the tourism industry has been missing since the dawn of the internet. This score is the result of our methodology refined over the years to best scan and interpret sentiment from massive volumes of content about travel. It has been purpose-built for tourism." (Source)
In 2022 the Whitsundays region of Queensland was ranked in second place out of the 100 destinations covered by the survey.