St. Louis, MO (KMOX) - St. Louis tourism officials are using the geospatial technology found in the palm of your hand, to keep track of visitors to the region.
It's called geofencing. "A geofence is basically a virtual perimeter around a real-world geographic area. Then it measures the movement of cell phones, other location enabled devices in and out of that area," explains Patrick Remming, Assistant Director of Marketing for Explore St Louis.
Remming tells KMOX's Total Information AM, the technology uses cell towers and other wireless connections. "We have geofenced all of the hotels in St. Louis City and County and we then look at those visitors and where they are coming from and use that information to better target our advertising to bring more visitors and to spend money in the community." How do they know where home is for those visitors? "They know where you sleep at night based on the resting area of your cell phone. They know at night it sits there for 10 or 12 hours at a time, they know that's your home location." Remming says Explore does not track personal information or exact addresses, just broader zip codes.
The St. Louis Arch recently used geofencing to determine the the National Park has far more visitors to the grounds, than turnstiles alone were able to capture.