LEADING PLACES:
THE 50 MOST LOVED TRAVEL DESTINATIONS
FOR CANADA
RANKED BY CONSUMER SENTIMENT FROM 2021
DISCOVER THE 2021 RANKINGS, POWERED BY
TOURISM SENTIMENT INDEX
For the first time ever, destinations in Canada have been ranked to uncover those that are truly most loved.
These Leading Places are the 50 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 50 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.
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.
That study first produced the 100 most loved destinations around the world. Now, we present the rankings for Canada.
These are the 50 Most Loved Destinations for Canada, having earned the highest Tourism Sentiment Score®.
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.
COUNTING DOWN THE 50 MOST LOVED DESTINATIONS
50.
St. John's
Newfoundland and Labrador
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
16.71
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
48.
Kamloops
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
16.99
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
46.
Harrison Hot Springs
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
17.28
Top driver:
Hot springs
44.
Fraser Valley
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
17.85
Top driver:
Winery + Vineyards
42.
Scarborough
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
17.88
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
40.
Thompson Valley
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
18.19
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
38.
Winnipeg
Manitoba
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
18.77
Top driver:
Spectator sports
36.
Vernon
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
18.99
Top driver:
Wildlife viewing
34.
Ottawa
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
19.49
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
32.
Ucluelet
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
19.64
Top driver:
Wildlife viewing
30.
Quebec City
Quebec
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.12
Top driver:
Street art + Public art
28.
Nanaimo
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.27
Top driver:
Nature photography
26.
Edmonton
Alberta
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.32
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
24.
Whistler
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.40
Top driver:
Skiing + Snowboarding
22.
Parksville
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.73
Top driver:
Beaches
20.
Cape Breton
Nova Scotia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.33
Top driver:
Hiking + Rock climbing
18.
Saskatoon
Saskatchewan
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.75
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
16.
Guelph
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.90
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
14.
Gold Rush Trail
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.10
Top driver:
Nature photography
12.
Surrey
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.51
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
10.
Sunshine Coast
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.80
Top driver:
Beaches
08.
Tofino
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.95
Top driver:
Beaches
06.
Shuswap
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
23.55
Top driver:
Fishing
04.
Kelowna
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
23.60
Top driver:
Winery + Vineyards
02.
Mississauga
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
27.58
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
49.
Victoria
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
16.84
Top driver:
Architecture
47.
Kitchener
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
17.13
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
45.
Kingston
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
17.31
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
43.
Abbotsford
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
17.86
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
41.
Montreal
Quebec
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
18.05
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
39.
Revelstoke
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
18.20
Top driver:
Skiing + Snowboarding
37.
Fredericton
New Brunswick
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
18.99
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
35.
Haliburton Highlands
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
19.41
Top driver:
Hiking + Rock climbing
33.
Vancouver
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
19.63
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
31.
Halifax
Nova Scotia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
19.84
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
29.
Squamish
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.21
Top driver:
Hiking + Rock climbing
27.
Barrie
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.32
Top driver:
Shopping
25.
Chilliwack
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.35
Top driver:
Attractions
23.
Vancouver Island
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
20.66
Top driver:
Beaches
21.
Jasper
Alberta
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.05
Top driver:
Hiking + Rock climbing
19.
Calgary
Alberta
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.70
Top driver:
Air travel
17.
Toronto
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.88
Top driver:
Restaurant/Dining/Takeaway
15.
Campbell River
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
21.91
Top driver:
Fishing
13.
Similkameen
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.22
Top driver:
Hiking + Rocking climbing
11.
Okanagan
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.71
Top driver:
Winery + Vineyards
09.
Cariboo Chilcotin Coast
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
22.92
Top driver:
Wildlife viewing
07.
Banff
Alberta
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
23.21
Top driver:
Hiking + Rock climbing
05.
Canmore
Alberta
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
23.59
Top driver:
Wildlife viewing
03.
Niagara
Ontario
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
23.91
Top driver:
Winery + Vineyards
01.
Richmond
British Columbia
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
28.30
Top driver:
Air travel
??.
Where does your
destination rank?
Tourism
Sentiment
Score®
?
We celebrate the Leading Places named here and all the destinations in Canada striving to make the experiences and exchanges that travel can bring rewarding for everyone.
We salute every destination organization working to help local communities navigate the pandemic safely and address the many other challenges that our world is facing.
We look forward to supporting many of you throughout 2022.
For any destinations that appear to have the same Tourism Sentiment Score, the difference in scores lies beyond the hundredths of a point.
ABOUT LEADING PLACES
Leading Places are destinations that strive to be their best for residents, for visitors and for the parts of the world that they cover. The future of tourism needs Leading Places that make travel experiences rewarding and responsible in equal measure. We celebrate the Leading Places pursuing innovative, effective and thoughtful destination marketing and destination management. We provide data products to destination marketing organizations to help their progress towards being recognized by real people as Leading Places. We strive to support the tourism industry by publicly sharing what we can learn from Leading Places through the 100 Most Loved Destinations, posts on LinkedIn and tweets on Twitter.
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.
Our customers use the Tourism Sentiment Score® to gauge current performance and to establish a benchmark to track over time. It is a reflection of each destination’s tourism industry, featuring an overall score and scores for up to 50 tourism assets that cover every known aspect of the travel experience (transportation, accommodation, attractions, events, etc.).
We uncovered the most loved destinations by using the methodology of Tourism Sentiment Index to review the destinations in our database.
Every day, Tourism Sentiment Index gathers more than 2 million pieces of content posted publicly online about global destinations of every level: countries, states, provinces, islands, cities, towns, regions and major parks. Our proprietary analysis produces a destination’s Tourism Sentiment Score®.
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.