TRAVERSE CITY – In a city known for its tourism that welcomes millions of visitors every year, keeping track of those numbers is a challenge.
Whitney Waara, chief operating officer of Traverse City Tourism, said Traverse City primarily uses retrospective tools to understand trends, economic impact, and consumer behavior in the Grand Traverse region.
Services like the STAR Report and AirDNA provide reports on hotel and short-term rental activity for Traverse City properties that opt into their subscription services.
These tools analyze overall lodging trends and compare current performance to previous years. Adjustments are often made for factors such as market growth and the addition of new rental properties.
Traverse City Tourism also uses Placer.ai – a tool that was originally developed to track foot traffic in retail settings – to monitor geographical aspects of tourism.
Efforts to reach sources at Placer.ai for comment were unsuccessful. But, according to their website, Placer.ai uses aggregated mobile location data to show where people go during their time in Traverse City and how those patterns vary by time of year. It doesn’t track or identify individuals.
By analyzing cell phone ZIP codes, the Placer.ai service can distinguish between different visitor types – such as tourists, seasonal residents, and local residents – to determine when and where economic activity is highest.
“It’s given us a lot of really helpful insights as we look at the importance of the visitor economy on our downtowns and on our various businesses,” Waara said.
Many events in Traverse City, such as those offered during the National Cherry Festival, are free. While those free events are likely to draw more people, they eliminate ticket sales as a tool for tracking tourist traffic. So services such as Placer.ai provide a way for them to count those numbers, Waara said.
Traverse City Tourism CEO Trever Tkach said that specific hotel numbers and the overall impact of the 2025 National Cherry Festival are not available from Placer.ai yet. However, he said they know the week of the festival was “strong from a visitation standpoint.”
Kevin Klein, chief executive officer of the Cherry Capital Airport, confirmed that the airport’s numbers are strong, recording a 24% increase in passengers so far this year, compared to its record year in 2024.
The airport tracks tourism through the number of passengers who board and depart from the airport, Klein said.
They’ve reported significant growth over the years, Klein said, adding that he expects the number of tourists visiting the city to continue to increase.
In 2026, the airport is planning to construct five new airline gates to serve the rising demand.
“We have a big impact and a big draw,” he said.
While data tracking services provide valuable ranges of tourism data for the city, Waara said these results cannot be trusted “100%” on their own.
To ensure the greatest accuracy, Traverse City Tourism validates the information and works with local businesses to gather anecdotal data and compare findings with sales records.
When it comes to personal privacy, Waara said that all data collected is recorded as a whole and the city does not have access to individual consumer behavior or identities.
“One person’s behavior (is) not something that is at all available to us,” she said. “We’re not trying to understand any individual person or what that person is doing.”
These tracking services rely on data collected from common mobile apps.
The users of these apps have the opportunity to opt in or out of location services used by Placer.ai.
The data collected then accounts for the percentage of the population that opted-out when estimating totals.
Data tracking services are also used to inform marketing decisions. Waara said that the city recently launched a marketing campaign in Detroit Metro Airport after discovering that many Traverse City visitors pass through that airport.
Other Michigan cities, such as Kalamazoo, also use Placer.ai to monitor tourism.
Dana Wagner is the director of marketing and communications for Discover Kalamazoo, the destination marketing organization for Kalamazoo County. She said that Kalamazoo has been using Placer.ai for about three years to track overall tourism trends and support individual businesses.
“It has been a great tool for us,” Wagner said, adding that the organization shares monthly data reports with tourism and hospitality partners, as well as the local government.
Wagner said the data helps their county understand visitor behavior, especially for non-hotel guests who wouldn’t otherwise be accounted for in STAR reports. Discover Kalamazoo also occasionally cross-references other data sources, such as ticket sales, to validate findings.