Mudgee Region Tourism CEO Cara George explained how a bit of on-air banter about the Mudgee region led to the crew of one of Australia's biggest radio shows spending the weekend here.

"So a few weeks ago, a couple of Sydney birdies told me that Kyle and Jackie O on the KIIS FM station Breakfast Show were talking poorly about Mudgee. They didn't know much about us and someone had said maybe they would go to Mudgee post-iso for their first trip, and they kind of dragged us out a little bit," Cara laughed.

"They didn't know where Mudgee was and what we had to offer. And, yeah, it wasn't... you know, some people say 'All media is good media' but this wasn't great media for the region. So, once I heard that I reached out and emailed all the producers and broadcasters in the crew and said, 'You know, guys, I get it. You don't know about us but you've got us all wrong'.

"So I kind of set a few things straight and just let them know what we do offer around here and show them some images of our beautiful region, and offered to host them, our shout, just to turn their minds around. So, within a few hours, I had eight of the crew including the producer and executive producer and the newsreader all confirmed for a weekend in Mudgee.

For the crew members, this was their first big trip out of lockdown.

"We really rolled out the red carpet for them. And what was fabulous is that they started talking about that from last Thursday and Friday on-air which made amazing coverage and they could already feel the love from our region so that perception started to change and there was a lot of fun on-air between Kyle and Jackie O talking to the crew myself and Basso from Real FM got interviewed live on Friday morning to talk about the region with Kyle and Jackie O, all with a bit of fun," Cara said.

"The crew were absolutely amazing they were just, they were really appreciative genuine people and they literally just fell in love with the region.

"So we've already got them booking their next stays. We've already had a little bit of coverage this morning when they opened the show they talked about Mudgee in a really positive light which was wonderful."

"We've made some friends of the region which were really excited about.

"But they were really, really appreciative and they felt the love from the community and because we had put in on air and fun with it last week locally last week a lot of the locals knew who they were when they're walking around town so they would reach out to them and talk with them and so the crew just felt like, just really well looked after and I think we've got some new ambassadors."