JACKSON (WNE) — What started out as a way to monitor travel patterns of Jackson visitors to see if the town was meeting their needs has now become an effective tool for tracking tourism trends during the pandemic.

Cellphone data service Placer.ai, a foot-traffic analytics firm in Los Altos, California, offers four years of historical data for analysis. The Jackson Hole Travel and Tourism Board recently purchased a license to use that data for close-to-real-time analysis of the volume of visitors in Jackson Hole.

Now that data is showing an unexpected rebound in visitors. For Brian Modena, marketing subcommittee chairman on the Travel and Tourism Board, the data is turning out to be key in guiding board decisions.

“I can see how many people were in Jackson on any given day from out of state over the last three years, plus this year,” Modena said.

Unlike specific cellphone apps developed for COVID-19 community spread tracking, Placer.ai uses area code data, giving the tourism board access to visitors’ locations before and after passing through Jackson, specific routes of travel, shopping tendencies, gender, household income and more.

Comparing the average of three years of tourist data collected before the pandemic with last week, overall traffic is up by 3%, he said. Modena said he was hesitant at first to share the data without another source of reference. However, after comparing hotel booking percentages with the percentage of visitors, the correlation was nearly 100%.