SOMEBODY’S WATCHING ME…
Published in the Jan. 24, 2026 issue
Big Brother, er, Mammoth Lakes Tourism (MLT), is watching you.
MLT, the town’s marketing arm, quietly launched a new partnership in December with a company called Datafy, announced Olivia Amber, MLT’s Marketing Coordinator, who presented the system at the organization’s board meeting Wednesday.
The company collects data from cell phones and payment systems to help MLT understand where visitors come from, how they move through the area, and how much they spend.
The program works by aggregating millions of location pings from phones, Wi-Fi, and GPS, along with transaction data, to paint a big-picture view of visitation patterns. Datafy’s platform updates frequently, combining real-time snapshots with weekly refreshes to give MLT a dynamic picture of tourism activity.
For example, on the weekend of Margarita fest each year, the data could prove that crowds tend to start at the Village and then spill onto the same parts of the street where vomit mysteriously appears the next day. Or after the annual 4th of July chihuahua races, people tend to swarm towards the Mono County Animal Shelter. All hypotheticals … but you get the idea.
This data farming is completely legal because MLT is just buying insights, not raw private data. Datafy gets this data from “third-party providers,” which consumers give their consent for companies to collect information.
You know how Google asks for your location when you search “restaurants near me”? Or how your credit card says it might share your info in that super long terms-and-conditions section nobody reads? That’s exactly how MLT knows what you’re up to.
To be clear, neither MLT, nor Datafy, is able to identify individuals or exactly who is where at what time. It instead creates a sort of heat map showing where crowds flock and when.
Before partnering with Datafy, MLT relied on a company called Tourism Economics for modeled economic data, a more traditional approach that estimated spending and visitation based on surveys, assumptions, and multipliers.
Not only is that data more easily skewed than the real time data farming Datafy offers, it’s also a lot more expensive because it requires more on-the-ground work from analysts.
Tourism Economics reports typically ran $40,000–$50,000 per year, and were sometimes higher if multiple updates or custom analyses were needed. The Datafy contract will cost MLT just $28,000 total for 18 months, which Mono County plans to chip in for.
“It was exponentially more expensive,” MLT Vice President, Sarah Winters said.
But the system isn’t perfect. It doesn’t capture every visitor, especially in areas with poor cell coverage like backcountry trails. It can’t replace on-the-ground counts or surveys entirely, and the exact accuracy in certain areas is still being tested.
Regardless, the insights will supposedly help guide marketing campaigns, manage crowding, plan events, and make infrastructure decisions, like which trailheads may need more parking or which events see seasonal spikes.
Otherwise, in terms of revenue, Mammoth Lakes did surprisingly well in November 2025, despite low snow totals throughout the month and a slow summer just before.
Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT) collections for November reached $1.22 million, exceeding budget by 62% and up 33% from last year, Vice President Winters said.
However, as Snowcreek Manager John Morris corrected, that 33% increase is misleading because last year was an unusually low TOT month because most of last year’s lodging revenue for that period was posted in December, not November, due to how departures and accounting fell around the calendar.
Regardless, year-to-date TOT revenue stands at $7.71 million, also 62% above budget. A portion of these funds, 2% designated as Measure L, generated nearly $188,000 in November for housing initiatives, bringing YTD contributions to $1.14 million.
The Tourism Business Improvement District (TBID) was also flush, with November collections of $420,295, slightly above budget and up 17% from last year. Year-to-date TBID revenue is $1.89 million, nearly on budget.
Financial reserves remain healthy. Lodging, restaurant and retailers all show positive growth.
As for Mammoth Mountain Ski Area (MMSA), CEO Eric Clark said the resort is doing well now despite the early season lack of snow, and bad ratings following the avalanche that killed patroller Cole Murphy over the holidays.
“We’ve had a great January. When we look at our guest scores… they’ve never been lower than they were during this incident [the avalanche] and so forth, but right now, they’ve never been higher,” he said.
