Mississauga is #1 destination in Ontario and top 50 in the world

By

Published March 1, 2022 at 10:18 pm

Move over, London, Paris and Toronto — Mississauga is a major destination, and there is data that proves it.

Evidently, the city is one of the most loved destinations in the world, according to the Tourism Sentiment Index (TSI), which ranks more than 20,000 communities worldwide by analyzing online conversations and publicly available content pieces. In its latest ranking, Mississauga ranked No. 42 in the world, which was the highest on the list of any Ontario city and the second-highest of any community in Canada.

The four-year-old TSI was launched in a 2018 as a way to try to quantify what visitors truly feel about major cities and regions. Apparently, Mississauga — with manifold arts, cultural and recreational opportunities, one of the most diverse populations in Canada and waterfront access along Lake Ontario — grades out very well.

“Word of mouth built this list, unprompted and unbiased,” a TSI explainer at sentiment-index.com states. “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.”

The only Canadian community that outranks Mississauga is Richmond, B.C., which drew in at No. 34, eight spots higher. No other Ontario city, including Toronto, is ranked in the top 100. World capitals such as Paris, New York, London and Tokyo are also not in the top 100, although Las Vegas is ranked No. 32.

The Tourism Sentiment Index’s data scientists say their data points including 1.6 billion online conversations. The crux of the initiative is try to give classic ‘word of mouth advertising’ a numeric value. The principle behind that is that peer-to-peer conversations are one of the most trusted sources of information for selecting travel destinations and determining which experiences to try.

“This is the metric that the tourism industry has been missing since the dawn of the internet,” the website says by way of explanation. 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.

” … Market research consistently shows that word of mouth is and always has been the predominant influence on the travel decision-making process,” it adds.

Sentiment-index.com says that no cities or regions have paid to be ranked, and they do not rely on surveys that might have been designed to generate a desired answer, which is known as push-polling.

Mississauga received a TSI score of 27.58 to draw in between No. 41 Hermanus, South Africa (27.65) and Lake District, England (27.51). The above-mentioned Richmond, B.C., which is a suburb of Vancouver, received a score of 28.30.

The other Canadian cities and regions that squeaked into the top 100 were No. 96 Kelowna, B.C. (23.60 TSI score), No. 97 Canmore, Alta. (23.59) and No. 99 Shuswap, B.C. (23.55), which is a lake community in the southern interior of Canada’s westernmost province.

The top U.S. destination, according to the data crunching, is Savannah, Ga., which ranks 14th with a score of 31.03.

Mississauga is about 10 points behind the top 10 cities. The top 10 includes four destinations in Australia, two in Mexico, one in India and one in the Dominican Republic.

Tourism Sentiment Index, 2021:

  1. Sunshine Coast, Australia (region): 37.90
  2. Whitsundays, Australia (region): 37.76
  3. Udaipur, India: 37.72
  4. Bora Bora, French Polynesia: 37.36
  5. Noosa, Australia: 35.41
  6. Nice, France: 34.96
  7. Punta Cana, Dominican Republic: 34.28
  8. Cancun, Mexico: 32.93
  9. Cairns, Australia: 32.69
  10. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico: 32.43

The entire ranking may be read at sentiment-index.com.

insauga's Editorial Standards and Policies advertising