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Visit Lafayette asks county to fund Placer AI subscription for visitor analytics; council to consider resolution in February
Summary
Visit Lafayette asked the Tippecanoe County Council for a $32,500 allocation from innkeeper/ lodging tax funds to continue a Placer AI subscription that provides visitor movement and event analytics; presenters emphasized use cases for event planning and local marketing, while council members raised privacy and accuracy caveats. The council directed staff to place a resolution on the February agenda.
Visit Lafayette, West Lafayette representatives asked the Tippecanoe County Council on Jan. 13 to commit $32,500 in innkeeper (lodging) tax dollars for year two of a three‑year Placer AI subscription that provides location‑analytics and visitor‑journey data to support marketing and event planning.
Joe Wade introduced the presentation and turned the technical explanation to Justina Brown Walter, who described Placer AI as a location‑analytics company that uses a panel of devices to estimate visits, visitor home locations and cross‑visit patterns. "Placer AI uses 35 million devices in the US that they track the movement of… and they gather a lot of data on that visitor movement," Justina said, explaining that the platform produces dashboards and exportable reports used by local partners to measure event attendance, visitor origin and dwell time.
The Visit Lafayette team said local partners — including Greater Lafayette Commerce and area museums — have already used the data for event planning, potential grant applications and hotel leakage analyses. They said the county's visitor center, chambers and even smaller businesses could receive customized reporting through Visit Lafayette.
Presenters emphasized that the data are estimates: to derive demographics, Placer AI identifies a device's "home location" as a place occupied 30 days or more, then applies census data to that location to produce demographic estimates. Justina told the council that the platform's methodology yields estimates that should inform, not replace, other research.
Council members asked technical and privacy questions. One member described the approach as "a little bit of infringement on privacy" and asked how Placer AI derives demographic estimates; Justina reiterated that estimates rely on home‑location inference and census overlays and that the raw device panel is proprietary to Placer AI. Staff also noted limits: certain large outdoor events (cell‑tower congestion) and specific POI customizations can produce imperfect data; Placer AI limits custom POI sizes to 500,000 square feet unless done on the vendor's back end.
Visit Lafayette requested a motion and asked the council to place a resolution on the February agenda to allocate the innkeeper funds; council members indicated support and agreed to add a resolution for the next meeting for formal action.
