Tourism Agencies Use Mobile Data to Track Travelers Crashing With Friends and Relatives
Photo Credit: Tourism agencies are finding opportunities in the travelers visiting friends and relatives segment. Unsplash / Felix Rostig
Skift Take
Limitations on understanding the travelers visiting friends and relatives segment have been eroding, but they are still there when it comes to the imaginations of destination marketers. Tourism agencies should try to push the envelope.
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 ha
