By Nicolas Dessureault, Co-founder & VP Insights, Propulso

Earlier this year I stood in a breakout room in Vancouver at City Nation Place Americas and showed a group of destination leaders a number that made a few of them wince. Before I share it with you, let me offer the same disclaimer I gave them: I am not here to teach you your job. You are the experts at developing an offer, taking it to market, and engaging the audiences you want to reach. What we do at Propulso — turning anonymised mobility signals into visitor intelligence — simply collides rather beautifully with what you already do. This article is about one collision in particular.

It starts with a distinction every DMO knows by heart: the difference between an excursionist and a tourist. A visitor who stays the night generates an economic impact two to three times higher than a day-tripper on the same trip, once the accommodation multiplier does its work. Excursionists are inevitable — there will always be people who drive in, enjoy your destination and drive home. But 'inevitable' is not the same as 'invisible'. If you can understand who your day-trippers are and why they come, you can start converting some of them into overnight guests. That matters because endless growth in visitor volume is impossible and, in many places, undesirable. More visitors is not always achievable. More value per visitor always is — and it happens to be the more sustainable way to grow.

What we did in Burlington

To put this to the test, our customer success team and I looked for a destination whose situation would be replicable across North America. We chose Burlington, Vermont — and I should say, as I did in Vancouver with Burlington's own team in the room, that there was no favouritism involved. Burlington earned its place because it looks successful on the surface: a strong brand, a beautiful pedestrian core in Church Street, the lake, an international airport, ski mountains, golf, trails — a dense and diverse offer. Structurally, it resembles Banff, Whistler, Boulder, or Salt Lake City. Exactly the kind of destination where a data gap is hardest to see.

We analysed the heart of downtown Burlington, centred on Church Street, over twelve months of 2025. In that window we observed 300,000 unique mobile devices — generating more than a billion individual data points. We excluded residents and anyone who had travelled less than 40 kilometres (25 miles), the standard North American threshold for tourism. Then we examined visit patterns, socio-demographics, and the consumer journey before and after each visit.

One note on method, because I dislike magic tricks: everything we publish comes with its sample size and its capture rate, so any number can be interrogated and extrapolated in the open. This was not a survey of 500 people. It was observed behaviour at population scale.

Five out of six walk away

Here is the number. Of those 300,000 non-resident, non-local devices, 83% were excursionists. Five out of six visitors to Church Street left the same day they arrived — and when they left, so did their economic potential.

The behavioural detail makes it more interesting, not less. The average excursionist spent around six hours on site — a full day out, not a pit stop. The average tourist stayed 1.5 nights. But look at loyalty: tourists came back 3.4 times a year on average, and only about a third of them visited just once. Among excursionists, 62% came only once. In other words, the visitors who generate two to three times the impact are also the most committed and most likely to return. Your highest-value visitors are your least-served segment. That is the strategic irony buried in most destinations' foot traffic — and it is why foot traffic alone is not economic impact.

Closer, wealthier and better educated than you think

Knowing the split is only half the equation. We took the points of origin of those devices and cross-referenced them with census data to build a profile of Burlington's day-tripper. They are slightly younger than the national benchmark (around 43 years old), far more educated (62% post-secondary against a 45% national average), earn more (roughly $98K household income against $90K) and travel with bigger families (3.7 people against 3.4).

Two findings stood out. First, 71% of these excursionists live within half a day's drive. Second, one in three of them also visited mountain resorts or country clubs during the year — skiing, mountain biking, golf. So, this is not an anonymous crowd flowing through a pedestrian street. It is a defined, premium, reachable audience that already loves the destination. They are not avoiding the overnight stay. They have simply never been given a reason to book one.

When I showed that slide in Vancouver, I described it as a production brief — because that is what it is. Who they are, where they live, what they love, how often they come: everything a team needs to design an offer tailored to convert them.

Same leak, different postcode

You might reasonably ask whether Burlington is an outlier. It is not. There is a lovely piece of history here: the architect behind Church Street also worked on Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado. They are sister streets — same design philosophy, similar walkable core, similar outdoor-adjacent university-city energy. When we ran the same analysis on Pearl Street, the results were nearly identical: 86% excursionists, an average day visit of just over five hours, overnight stays of 1.5 nights. The origin markets were completely different — Boulder draws heavily from California, Burlington from New England — but the ratio held. This is not a local anomaly. It is a structural pattern hiding in walkable urban destinations across North America.

The problem is solvable — others have done it

The point of exposing a gap is not to admire it. Three examples I shared in Vancouver show what conversion looks like in practice. In Ontario, the provincial government's Destination Niagara strategy is explicitly repositioning one of the continent's most extreme day-trip destinations into a multi-day 'playground', backed by product development and infrastructure investment. In British Columbia, Tourism Whistler made overnight visitation — not total visitor counts — its primary KPI, and paired that with off-peak programming; the summer of 2025 was its most successful season on record. When you change what you measure, you change what you manage.

My favourite, because we worked on it, is the smallest: Mont Sutton, in Quebec's Eastern Townships. The data confirmed what everyone suspected — the overwhelming majority of ski visitors drove back to Montreal the same evening. Sutton owns no hotels, so the mountain, the municipality and local inns and restaurants built a bundled offer together: Ski-Dodo-Ski ('ski-sleep-ski') — a lift ticket, a night's accommodation, a warm breakfast and a second day on the slopes. The genius is its honesty: the mountain is the attraction, so the mountain is what keeps people overnight. And once a visitor stays, the impact spreads — lunch the next day, fuel for the car, perhaps a stop at the pharmacy for a sore back. That is what converting an inevitable excursionist actually looks like.

So — what is your ratio?

Every destination has a five-to-one problem, or a four-to-one, or a seven-to-one. The uncomfortable truth is that most cannot answer the question, because the traditional toolkit — annual surveys, accommodation data without context, insights frozen in time — was never built to answer it. Observed mobility data is continuous, population-scale and refreshed constantly, which means the cycle becomes a virtuous circle: analyse, deploy, measure, tweak, and go again.

None of this replaces your strategy or your local expertise. It gives them sharper eyes. The visitors are already on your streets, six hours at a time. The only question is whether you can see them clearly enough to give them a reason to stay the night.

If you are curious what your own ratio looks like, this is exactly the kind of analysis our GeoIndicators platform builds for destinations — the Burlington study took days, not months, and the historical data for your territory already exists.