KNYSNA NEWS - Who would have thought that, of all the world's most cherished coastal havens, our very own would not only surface as the winner of all South African contenders, but also end up in the top 20 of all such destinations worldwide?
After being measured against the best in the tourism industry, Knysna came out at number 19 on the Tourism Sentiment Index's list of the top 100 most-loved destinations in the world.
The inaugural list of the world's most-loved destinations was released by the Tourism Sentiment Index (TSI) last week with Knysna placed at number 19, the highest of only four South African destinations to make the list.
According to TSI's website, the list is based on word of mouth, and to be able to put together the list, the TSI analysed its 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," the TSI's website reads.
Following the analysis of the data the destinations were placed in order based on their Tourism Sentiment Score, helping determine the Top 100.
"Tourism Sentiment Score is a measure of a destination's ability to generate positive word of mouth about its tourism offering. It is an aggregate score that focuses solely on online conversations and content that reference or affect a potential traveller's perceptions of a destination's tourism offering," the website reads.
"To calculate the score, we collect all the conversations and content around a destination and, through natural language processing, filter to those that are driven by a destination's tourism experiences or products. The remaining data is classified as positive, neutral or negative as artificial intelligence deciphers sentiment from human expression."
Knysna's Tourism Sentiment Score came in at 30,23. The next-best SA destination was Stellenbosch in 23rd place with a score of 29,31. This is followed by Hermanus in 41st with a score of 27,65, and finally Cape Town at number 54 with a score of 26,24.
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