Diving into interesting travel data for our area | News, Sports, Jobs

One of the focuses of the Chamber in recent months is being able to analyze data to help us make decisions and drive some direction for our tourism efforts.

Enter the company Arrivalist, a subscription service we have enrolled in that tracks where travelers to Marshalltown are coming from.

Yes, it has a “Big Brother is watching you” element to it as it tracks cell phone movement and tells us when someone has visited Marshalltown for more than four hours, but we are not that creepy as we only get the total people, not individual names, of who is actually visiting here.

Our leading region for in-state travel comes from the big Des Moines/Ames market as expected.

The out-of-state numbers are interesting. For instance, did you know that 1,400 visitors have made their way to Marshalltown so far this year from the Los Angeles area?

Some of our leading out-of-state visitor regions are more predictable such as Omaha, Chicago, Minneapolis, and the Quad Cities area. You might be interested to know that more than 1,000 visitors made their way here from the Denver area so far this year.

It’s hard to pinpoint what these travelers are coming to do, many might be visiting family, passing through on a trip across the state or really, really want a Maid-Rite.

We can speculate that many out-of-state visitors came for the Indy Car races in Newton, the big Hispanic music concerts that made their way to Marshalltown this summer, or the groups from Chicago who play in the big adult softball tournaments here.

Arrivalist also provides the numbers of those who stayed overnight in Marshalltown. This data will not only help us learn about where our overnight stays are coming from, but will also be a vital resource to our hotel partners as we work together to draw more visitors here.

This could assist with future marketing efforts as we connect the dots with maps in the Midwest. It’s very interesting data to look into and we are excited about what this means for our future tourism prospects.

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Andrew Potter is Tourism Director with the

Marshalltown Area Chamber of Commerce.