Arrivalist, a leading location intelligence platform in the travel industry, announced that it is making two datasets free to its customers through the end of the year so its clients can act and react to ever-changing travel patterns as the country emerges from the pandemic.
The new datasets allow customers to compare visitation in 2021 to activity from the same period in 2019, not just the timeframe when travel slowed to a virtual standstill in 2020. Comparing March 2021 to March 2019 reveals that U.S. road trips, for the year, are within 10.9% of pre-Covid levels.
“Whether promoting themselves or not, it’s vital that our clients get daily updates – without fear of inconsistency – on the visitation volume to their destinations,” says Arrivalist Founder & CEO Cree Lawson.
The company is making custom versions of two datasets – the Calibrated Travel Trending Report, based on the Daily Travel Index, and its revised Daily Arrivals data – free to clients who subscribe directly to its visitation data through the end of the year. A free version of the Daily Travel Index, which measures road trip activity and organizes it by origin of travel, has been available to all online; the custom version distributed to clients will measure daily road trip activity and reveal travel based on the destination travelers are choosing. Clients will also receive daily updates to visitation, improved from a 30-day update cycle. They will also receive free competitive benchmarking insights.
“Accurate aggregated movement data has never been more vital to communities and travel companies than it is today,” says Lawson. “We don’t want our clients to be rudderless or hobbled by inaccurate data as visitors begin returning to their destinations en masse. If we need to make concessions by deploying our calibrated data openly, then that’s worthwhile to help measure travel’s rebound during this time of need.”
“As a data-driven organization, Visit Florida is committed to partnering with companies that can provide us with the most recent, accurate, and accessible data that support the work we do on behalf of Florida’s travel industry,” says Staci Mellman, CMO of Visit Florida. “We’ve found Daily Travel Index to be a vital tool during these volatile times and appreciate access to the tool as we look towards our recovery.”
The company has been developing its patent-pending algorithms that normalize, or calibrate, datasets for accuracy for years. Its models aggregate, increment, and decrement movement from a set panel of devices to make that movement representative of all human movement, whether it is biased toward one device, one demographic, or one operating system, such as iOS14 or Android. The fifth version of iOS14 (iOS14.5) is expected to be released any day, and some features in the update are expected to cause erratic changes to app-derived location data, primarily in day-to-day or year-over-year trending.
“This isn’t un-precedented or un-expected. Fortunately, we’ve been future proofing for years,” says Lawson. “We’ve had practice runs with iOS13, Intelligent Tracking Prevention and the deployment of CCPA.”
To validate its claims, the company points to its experience, on a more local level, of compensating for the loss of location signal that arose as CCPA was released in California in July 2020.
“If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that collecting the right data quickly and taking action on it is the best plan,” says Lawson. “We’re doing our best to make sure that the treasured clients we’ve worked with for over 10 years continue to have visitation trending data they can rely on.”
The company first deployed the road trip measure as part of its popular Daily Travel Index – a free resource that helped to measure the return of travel activity amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The Daily Travel Index measures road trips of 50 or more miles taken from a panel of millions of devices and updated every 48 hours. It has been picked up by the U.S. Travel Association, Skift and the National Travel and Tourism Office as part of their efforts to measure volatile fits and starts in travel behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic. The new Calibrated data, however, is not limited to road trip activity. The Daily Arrivals report reveals arrivals from flights as well.
“It’s good to see industry partners stepping up to provide consistent data during an ever-shifting travel landscape,” says Ashley McHugh, Director of Research for Memphis Tourism. “We plan to use this data to plot a steady path for our partners through these changing times.”
“Visitation trending data is vital to measuring movement in the pandemic and the return of travel,” says Lawson. “We’ve future-proofed our location data to provide clients essential insights about travel’s recovery despite the untimely deployment of iOS14.5”