MUSKEGON, Mich. — We're heading toward the last unofficial weekend of summer and there's encouraging economic news from the lakeshore.
Muskegon is reporting a successful summer festival season and has the numbers to prove it.
As they prepare for this weekend's Muskegon Polish Festival, city officials showed off the sophisticated software in use to track crowd sizes.
“They're definitely up across the board.”
As development director, Jake Eckholm’s office handles a lot of the number crunching that goes on behind the scenes.
“We're seeing numbers trending up for all of our festivals and music organizations and parties in the park-- just about everything we do down here,” he said.
Those numbers aren’t a guessing game, Eckholm said, but a product of sophisticated software called Placer.ai.
“It gives us a lot of solid data to kind of show that our event season is providing a lot of positive economic impact,” Eckholm noted.
Breaking down the data in exacting detail, the software reveals not only the number of attendees, but where they came from, where visitors spent their money and more.
It showed, for example, that the ever-popular Lakeshore Art Festival drew around 14-thousand art lovers in 2022:
Visitors came from as far away as the Chicago and Cleveland suburbs:
Another report showed attendance figures for June’s Taste of Muskegon blew-past estimates by thousands, exceeding expectations to the extent that organizers were forced to start recycling tickets.
Attendance figures for both festivals were up over last year, data showed.
“The summer festival season was amazing,” Lashelle Mikesell of Visit Muskegon related. “The secret is out. We're a beach town that has a lot to do.”
The city also has a separate firm that tracks local hotel stays, with data showing they may shattered the record set just last year.
“Records indicate that the lodging numbers are going to bypass last year showing that it was a very successful season for the accommodation taxes as well,” Mikesell explained.
The data gives city leaders and festival organizers a clear path to follow, Eckholm said.
What they’re doing right, what they could improve upon and what next year should look like.
“That's going to have an impact on you know, how many extra foot patrol police officers we're going to want down here, how many garbage receptacles, how many restrooms, so they help just create better events and better tourism experiences in downtown Muskegon,” He explained.
►Make it easy to keep up to date with more stories like this. Download the 13 ON YOUR SIDE app now.
Have a news tip? Email news@13onyourside.com, visit our Facebook page or Twitter. Subscribe to our YouTube channel.