Keep your finger on the pulse of today’s traveler patterns by accessing the DMO industry’s most trusted set of visitor intelligence data. As you are being approached and speaking to your city leaders and tourism stakeholders about the state of the industry, Arrivalist’s Daily Travel Index will provide you with powerful insights into traveler activity by state, regions and nation-wide. View time: under 4 minutes.
As practitioners in the tourism and travel space, we have always been intrigued by the technology that can provide ever more granular visitor intelligence data. For many of the reasons we have discussed in the Insights forum of StampDestinations.com, the free, publically available data from Arrivalist’s Daily Travel Index has really gotten our attention in 2020. In less than 4 minutes, you can watch this video to see how you can access and study these real-time travel trends to gain an all-important perspective on the state of travel in individual states, regions (of your own making) and nationwide. The complete transcript of this video is also below this screenshot.
I want to be totally clear – Stamp has absolutely no relationship with Arrivalist, but as practitioners in the travel and tourism space, we have been intrigued with their technology for some time.
My takeaway: a lot of what is publicly accessible for free on Arrivalist’s site is valuable information on a macro scale. Great for demonstrations of the technology. But until they subscribe, and really dig into their own data, destinations have not really been able to derive much meaningful insight for their own use from what is available for free.
However, in these unusual times we are currently clawing through as an industry, Arrivalist’s free data, that is available to aggregate by state, as well as how this data compares nationally, has tremendous value in helping us all gain perspective. Perspective that our stakeholders are increasingly looking to their respective Destination Marketing Organization to provide.
To sum it up, travel activity on the Friday leading up to Memorial Day of 2020 was 31.2% lower than the same Friday leading up to Memorial Day in 2019. However, this is less than half of one of the highest drops of 80.6% that was seen in Arrivalist’s data from Saturday, April 6th.
Looking ahead to travel on the Friday of the 2019 Labor Day weekend compared to travel on the Friday of the 2020 Labor Day weekend, showed almost as much travel activity. With the Friday before Labor Day 2020 only down about 3.5% vs. the Friday before Labor Day 2019.
Now, this data is just an indicator. It does not include what visitors actually spent on accommodations which will be forthcoming in your STR reporting. But even looking beyond Labor Day, for the two weekends immediately following this annual fall holiday, travel was down 19.4% and 17.9% respectively.
We are nowhere near being out of the woods and who knows what the immediate future holds, but it does help us see a glimmer of hope in this data that the number of Americans moving about is improving.
You can drill this data down by state (shown here on the right side of the screen) and compare it to your peer states, as well as see your state’s numbers compared to national numbers.
What a valuable resource just a few free clicks away. You should check it out for yourself at Arrivalist.com.
Hopefully, you are slightly encouraged by the direction this free data is indicating our industry could be headed. But just imagine what you could learn about visitors traveling to your destination by subscribing to Arrivalist for your destination.
Know where visitors are coming from, how long they stay in your market, segment by weekdays vs. weekends, etc.
In summary, our thought is that Arrivalist can provide you a real-time sense of the success of your efforts to attract and retain travelers to your destination and how your efforts compare to your peers on a state, local, regional, and even national level.