Tourist Boards Use Mobile Data to Track Travelers Staying With Friends

25.08.2023 - 14:28 / skift.com / Dawit Habtemariam

Some tourism agencies are using geolocation mobile data to identify visitors who stay with friends and relatives to hone their marketing efforts.

Geolocation mobile data allows destinations to track the aggregate movement of visitors around a destination and time spent there, and those tracked are kept anonymous. More tourism agencies are taking advantage of geolocation mobile data to study their visitor markets. Meet Boston, for example, uses mobile data to measure the effectiveness of its efforts to spread the wealth of tourism to more neighborhoods. 

Travelers visiting friends and relatives, which is usually called VFR, are an often overlooked group and hard to measure for destinations because they very often don’t stay at paid accommodations like hotels. Tourism agencies have historically leaned on their hotels for insight on how many visitors they have and where they come from. 

Agencies are trying zero in on the VFR segment, which represents a sizable portion of unaccounted for visitors. “Maybe as much as 70 percent of those coming to our destination are actually staying with family and friends,” said Brian Hall, chief marketing officer of Explore St. Louis, which started using VFR data last year.

The VFR segment is typically resilient and will continue to travel during downturns. During the pandemic, airlines pursued this segment because they were the only group that didn’t stop flying. 

But this group has historically been stereotyped as a low-spending segment that isn’t likely to splurge. “It’s a massive segment and it’s not that they don’t spend money. It’s not that they are unmarketable. It’s just that they travel a little bit of a different way than we typically think of it as,” said Dan Roberts, vice president of research and strategy for Virginia Tourism Corporation, which started utilizing the data last year. 

VFR spending is different from that of the usual leisure traveler’s. “They might spend more of their dollars on things like retail and grocery stores, but the absolute level of spending is lower than what the typical leisure traveler is,” said Roberts. He also noted at least 40 percent of Virginia’s VFR segment actually stay at hotels.

Agencies obviously would prefer more of these travelers to stay in hotels because it would translate into more spending and higher occupancy for hotels, but visitors won’t skip out on opportunities to save money, especially as hotel rates remain strong. Getting them to choose hotels over free stays with local friends and relatives is unrealistic, said Hall.

Where they spend their time present new opportunities to nudge them. Central Virginia’s most popular tourist destination is the Short Pump Mall thanks to the VFR segment, according to Roberts.