Taking on a different form that usual, the 2021 edition of the annual event was expanded to 24 days to facilitate it in a COVID-safe way.

The Australian Tourism Industry Council noted the Ballarat Heritage Festival stood out among other events by addressing the COVID-era and managed to host a successful event encircled in lockdowns and restrictions.

Ballarat mayor Daniel Moloney said the national win was massive for the city

"It is so rare to have one of our local festivals recognised at a national level to be judged the best festival or event in Australia. It's a huge result and I think it goes to show that all the resilience and hard work during the awful COVID period has really paid off," he said.

"One of the things I think we saw across the board with the awards last Friday night was that a lot of Victorian attractions and operators did quite well in the awards because they were all forced to do things very differently.

"Everyone knows that Victoria did it the hardest nationally when it comes to COVID lockdowns, in our case, we had eight lockdowns and being able to have festivals and events run during that period and to be constantly adapting showed a level of innovation that some of our interstate peers just didn't have to do."

Cr Moloney credited council's events team's ability to come up with plans for multiple COVID scenarios as one reason for winning the gong.

"I'm really proud of our team for working through that pretty tough period where we had no idea whether festivals would be able to go ahead, whether they'd have to be all online, whether you have small crowds, big crowds, and basically everything we had to do required four or five versions of an event plan and that's really draining when you have to multiply your workload so much," he said.

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"I think it really was the ability to run a festival during a period of such massive disruption and to innovate with different ways of creating online opportunities to be constantly innovating the different event elements and constantly evolving the heritage product."

Cr Moloney said council would take learnings from the successful festival and apply them to future events.

"One of the things we'll be doing, probably less so for this one but for future festivals, is to evolve the food offering, in particular," he said.

"Ballarat has really started to entrench itself as a food destination and we think that there's a great opportunity to piggyback off that and have a recognition of the different heritage foods that have played a role throughout Ballarat's development.

"When you play to a city's truths, it creates a really strong offer for a visitor. If we were playing to a couple of well-known truths about Ballarat, we're a heritage city and also we're a food destination now, so put the two together and you have a great package."

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