Memphis Tourism's role as the city's official destination marketing organization requires sophisticated metrics to understand travel trends, especially in the midst of a global pandemic.
Fueling that market trend data for Memphis Tourism is New York-based Arrivalist, which measures the location change of millions of devices across the United States and provides movement data to the travel industry.
And in an industry disrupted so dramatically by COVID-19, such insights can provide valuable intel for decision making.
"Our data helps Memphis adapt to changing travel patterns, so that they can attract the type of visitors who are going to enjoy the city," said Cree Lawson, founder and owner of Arrivalist.
Arrivalist's device data
Ashley McHugh, research director for Memphis Tourism, said the organization leverages Arrivalist's data in several ways, including estimating total visits by origin market; calculating the average trip duration for visitors to Memphis and Shelby County; and quantifying the success of its advertising campaigns.
“When a tracked device leaves its home location and arrives in Memphis, Arrivalist signals that arrival to Memphis Tourism,” McHugh said. “Arrivalist also shares where that device originated; how long that device stayed in Memphis; which points of interest the device visited; and whether that device visited our website before arriving. All this data is fully anonymous and only shared in aggregate, but it helps Memphis Tourism quantify visitation from key origin markets, as well as average trip duration. This includes the overall impact of our digital presence and other metrics.”
Arrivalist combines data from smartphones and connected cars as part of its calibrated data. Lawson said the data provides more in-depth insights into consumer movement. Memphis Tourism has been one of the first users to utilize that type of data.
According to McHugh, Memphis Tourism also partners with Arrivalist to quantify visits to over 150 points of interest in Memphis and Shelby County, with plans to expand that measurement program in 2023.
"Memphis Tourism invested heavily in data before the pandemic, and as a result they were able to react to changing market conditions much faster than the rest of the country," Lawson said.
Memphis as a 'road trip rock star'
McHugh said Arrivalist’s data has been essential, especially when COVID-19 restrictions started to loosen and travel resumed during the pandemic.
"When people began to travel again, road trips were the first type of travel to bounce back," McHugh said. "By leveraging a customized version of Arrivalist's daily travel index that was specifically created for Memphis and Shelby County — grounded in connected car data — Memphis Tourism was able to quantify the return of visitation from our drive markets, every day.
"We were also able to compare our unique daily travel index to national travel index trends, which was one of the earliest indicators that Memphis was recovering faster than the nation," she continued. "Memphis has continued to outperform national trends in hotel room night demand recovery, but the Arrivalist daily travel index was our first indicator of that upward momentum.”
Lawson noted Arrivalist quantified that drive market trips nationally in 2022 increased 11.9% from 2019, while flights in the U.S. were down 9.9% from 2019.
“This pandemic has ushered in a road trip renaissance, and Memphis has been a road trip rock star during the pandemic,” Lawson said. “They have recovered faster, filled up hotels quicker, and adapted to the new normal by aggressively using lots of data sets, including ours.”
