Visitors to Hawke's Bay will have their cellphone data collected so Hawke's Bay Tourism can see where they have come from, where they have been and how long they have stayed in the region.

A pilot project between the organisation and Spark off-shoot Qrious, a specialist big data and data analytics company, starts here next month before starting in other regions.

HBT chair George Hickton says the initiative "could totally revolutionise our understanding of visitors".

Opponents such as Tech Liberty's Thomas Beagle say the initiative is a further erosion of privacy and symptomatic of "a growth in surveillance society, the idea that we're being watched at all times so we can be analysed and either sold or punished accordingly".

Only data from Spark mobile phones will be collected. This is then 'anonymised' by Spark before being passed on to Qrious, meaning the company will not be able to identify any individual, said Qrious ceo Ed Hyde.

He said the Spark data will be combined with data from market research company Roy Morgan, which puts people into one of 51 'segments' within seven different profiles (depending on income, family size and lifestyle etc).

"For example, we can look at people in Hawke's Bay in the month of April. We can pinpoint which suburb they have come from around the country. We can then link that to the [profile] to find the dominant 'segment' or 'segments' that relate to that suburb and thereby create this map of the volume of people coming in to Hawke's Bay, how long they spent there, and linking that to the economic value that that group has delivered to the region," Hyde said.

"We cannot link any information we receive back to a specific individual, even if we were asked to. We take privacy and security very, very seriously," he said.

"We wouldn't be able to say someone had gone to Blackbarn, or whatever. We don't have that level of detail. Our information is variable depending on whether you're in rural or urban areas. In urban areas it's about 300-400 meters. In rural areas its about 1km or so".

The mobile phone owners will not know whether their data is being collected.

He said the project had been greeted enthusiastically by the tourism organisations who did not have high confidence in the statistics they use presently.

But Beagle said it was a "step too far".

"What gives Spark the right to collect data about us and sell it to other people? Sure, we use their service and I can sort of see an argument for saying that could sell data about our aggregate usage of their services - but also using it to collect our location and sell that ? It seems a step too far. And with a service like communications which is practically a vital utility, we're very limited in our ability to say no," he said.

"What it comes down is a growth in surveillance society, the idea that we're being watched at all times so we can be analysed and either sold or punished accordingly. It's just creepy to think that companies and the government want to track us to this extent and can just decide to do it without us having any say-so," he said.

Hickton informed Hawke's Bay Regional councillors of the initiative when presenting HBT's update for the first quarter of the year at a meeting last week.

It was raised after he and HBT general manager Annie Dundas agreed with councillors that visitor monitoring data used currently had major flaws.

Councillors questioned the worth of the 'Commercial Accommodation Monitor' which tallies the monthly number of people staying in hotels, motels, backpackers and holiday parks.

Dundas said the last five years had seen "a massive increase in the number of people staying in private homes" with a "proliferation of holiday home accommodation" and the preference of visitors to rent a holiday home through various websites such as book-a-bach, and these visitors were not picked up in the data.

Hickton said the monitor was "the standard for the industry for decades... but with the advent of the internet people have a direct booking opportunity now and they're not using commercial accommodation in quite the same way".

"The industry has gone [to Statistics NZ] time and time again. Most RTO [regional tourism organisations] suffer the same experience. It's the only data we're given. The better measure is spend, because that's really what we're trying to achieve," he said.

Hickton was excited about the Qrious project.

"We think this might answer the question completely and give us accurate data on who's coming to our region, from where, and for how long they're staying," he said.

"It's an exact record using the cellphone network to actually track visitors. Not only where they come from, but where they go to once they're here. It could totally revolutionise our understanding of visitors. It's pretty exciting".

"We're going to be the first region to trial that. We're engaged in it now, and I suspect within the next 3-6 months we'll probably be able to provide you with some quite interesting information," he said.

BY THE NUMBERS

HB Tourism quarterly update (Jan 1- March 31) highlights:

- In the year ending March 31 international visitor spend increased by $20m to $100m.

- Over the same period domestic visitor spend increased by $30m to $450m.

- Total visitor spend over the year of $550m put the region at sixth place of 16 regions. Ahead of it were only Auckland, Wellington, Queenstown, Christchurch and Waikato. It ranked above regions including Bay of Plenty, Rotorua, Taupo and Wanaka.

- In the year ended February there were 3.8m visitor nights spent in the region, a 2.8 per cent increase over the previous year.

- In the year ended March 31 the www.hawkesbaynz.com website had 206,337 unique users, a 14 percent increase on the previous year.

- Hawke's Bay Tourism gets half its funding ($850,000 of $1.6m) from the regional council. This level of funding has not changed in three years. The organisation believes it needs to double its funding in order to reach it's targets. The council's ten-year-plan (2015-2025), out for consultation until May 18, asks ratepayers if they think the council should increase annual funding to $920,000, with an annual CPI adjusted increase, and whether they would like their rates to increase to bring the total funding from HBRC to close to $2m.