FILE: A view of downtown Walnut Creek, Calif., in January 2021.

It didn’t take long for a Bay Area tourism board to realize that its new contract with a cyber company was generating buzz. During the Walnut Creek City Council meeting last week, Visit Walnut Creek gave an annual report highlighting a specific analysis it requested to learn more about city visitors. It focused on a basketball tournament for grade-school girls held in the city during early May. 

Arrivalist, a Miami-headquartered tech company that aggregates cellphone data, tracked people who came to Walnut Creek for more than two hours to decipher if they were a local or a visitor. It also broke down where they came from and where they went after their trip to Walnut Creek.

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Among the findings, Walnut Creek tourism officials learned that 824 people from Pennsylvania and 196 travelers from Ohio visited the Bay Area suburb for the Spring Classic tournament held May 3-4. They also noted how many nights visitors stayed over.

Nicole Hankton, the executive vice president for Visit Walnut Creek, told SFGATE that reactions to the Arrivalist report were prompt. “The East Bay Times called the next day,” she said. “I didn’t even realize people watched city council meetings on YouTube. It took off from there.”

Since the council meeting on........

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