The tourism experience is a mostly positive experience in Haliburton County.
Amanda Virtanen, the Director of Tourism at the county level, unveiled on Wednesday at the county council regular meeting, the findings of a “tourism sentiment index” report done by a company called Destination Think.
The reported showed that of all the online conversations reviewed for the report redundant, 44 per cent of them promoted the Haliburton Highlands.
In the summer of 2018, the Ontario Highlands Tourism Organization (OHTO) pitched the idea of letting Destination Think to look into the county, which Virtanen says “the Haliburton Highlands was well poised for this opportunity as we have a strong online presence and reach.”
Virtanen says the Tourism Sentiment Index gave insight into 2.5 million online conversations. Destination Think looked at those conversations between June 1st of 2017 and July 30th of 2018.
The Tourism Sentiment score was calculated by measuring an area’s ability to generate positive feedback online.
According to the TSI report, the most highly touted tourist activities in Haliburton County were nature viewing which had just over 8,000 conversations about it, beaches and shorelines that had just under 3,000 conversations and festivals and events that garnered over 2,300 conversations promoting it.
Part of the report detailed some areas, specifically dog sledding and snowmobiling, that have the potential to be tapped into.
Another aspect highlighted areas that Haliburton County is underperforming in getting positive feedback online, such as hiking and nightlife.
Virtanen pointed out that she is hopeful the new winter edition of Hike Haliburton will help and jokes that nightlife is not really present in the area so it made sense that it underperformed.
Several Haliburton County councillors asked to know how they looked for or found this information, suggesting that they can put more emphasis on the keywords or phrases to further boost the positive feedback.