The Town of Georgina and the Chamber of Commerce have received $2,400 through a partnership with Central Counties Tourism (CCT) to fund a one-year data collection project. The Visitation Pilot Project will use OPTiFi insights to provide metric data to better understand the impact of tourism throughout the municipality. OPTiFi measures the presence of customers in physical spaces via mobile devices but does not store addresses or other identifiers from mobile phones or devices.
“We are very excited to begin this collaborative project and look forward to the findings,” said Mayor Margaret Quirk. “Now that we are in Step one of the province’s Roadmap to Reopen, people will be visiting locations that are open within the pandemic guidelines. Whether the visit is local traffic or visitors from farther away, the information gathered will help us implement initiatives that support business recovery efforts and encourage additional traffic to our business areas when it is safe to do so.”
The data collected will support the Georgina Tourism Strategy, upcoming municipal projects or infrastructure needs, and assist various tourism stakeholders. In future, the project could evolve to provide data that measures the financial impact visitors have on the local economy.
The project will allow for the analysis of traffic and movement of visitors throughout the municipality – how long they are staying, where they are going and the overall activity of their stay. Insight into the travel patterns of those exploring the historic downtown Business Improvement Areas (BIAs), and where they originated from, is a key focus of interest.
Four zones have been chosen for the project and include the areas within and adjacent to the Uptown Keswick BIA, Sutton BIA and Jackson’s Point BIA, and De La Salle Park and Beach.
Sibbald Point Provincial Park received nearly twice the number of visitors in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the 2019 season, which indicates there is a significant amount of visitation taking place within the municipality.
The partnership with Central Counties Tourism will improve the project’s data and analysis by implementing its Environics Postal Code data collection software. Integrating with OPTiFi will enhance the quality and overall effectiveness of the data collected. Collaborating these two collection methods has never been done before and could open the door for future tourism visitor data projects.
OPTiFi’s full privacy details can be found on its website at optifi.io/privacy. For more information on the initiatives outlined in the Tourism Strategy Visit, georgina.ca/TourismStrategy.