Bellarine, Geelong rank among world’s best

THE Bellarine and Geelong are officially among the world’s most-loved tourism destinations, after both landed in the top 100 of a new global analysis.

Tourism Sentiment Index (TSI) released its first Leading Places rankings, which placed the Bellarine Peninsula at 25 and Geelong at 69 in the world’s favourite holiday spots.

Bellarine’s lofty rank placed it ahead of Las Vegas, USA, Queenstown, New Zealand and Bordeaux, France, while also giving it bragging rights over its cross-bay neighbour Mornington Peninsula.

Geelong was sandwiched between California’s wine and cultural hotbed Napa and German city Stuttgart in the worldwide rankings.

The Great Ocean Road was 86th in the index, while Australia was also top of the tree with the Sunshine Coast in first place overall.

TSI measures visitors’ feelings about tourism locations by data analysis, collating online conversations about travel and using artificial intelligence to gauge the sentiment of comments as positive, passive or negative.

The metric scrutinises all publicly available online content such as from social media, online reviews such as from TripAdvisor, news sites and blogs – totalling 1.6 billion comments about 21,330 locations.

It uses a complex algorithm to analyse the array of comments and boil the sentiment down to a single number, which is then compared across different destinations.

Tourism Greater Geelong and The Bellarine deputy executive director Tracy Carter said the ranking was especially impressive from the region following one of the toughest years in the tourism industry’s history.

“Geelong and The Bellarine have been much-loved destinations for generations of visitors. It’s wonderful to see the region recognised in this way by new audiences,” Ms Carter said.

“The incredible experiences we offer are clearly having a positive impact on the conversations people are having online.

“As we continue to work with our industry to build the brand of Geelong and The Bellarine and recover from the impacts of the pandemic, this recognition and positive buzz about the region will be really important.”