Location data company, Arrivalist, has updated its Daily Travel Index (DTI), which is an indicator of travel activity. The updated DTI has three new improvements, including the addition of overnight stays data on the website; up to four years of trending travel data (2019 to 2022) available for free; and the ability to compare trending travel data—organized by destination—across all 50 states.
Industry trending data is usually grouped into such buckets as overnight stays at hotels or overnight stays at vacation rentals. Since Arrivalist’s data is based on location data, or the movement of computing devices (not booking or occupancy data), the company can measure all overnight stays—not just those in hotels or vacation rentals, but also those staying with friends and relatives. Reporting real-time location data allows Arrivalist to provide overnight stay data faster compared to other sources.
The DTI comes from a panel of GPS devices that are observed taking road trips of 50 miles or more. Arrivalist measures trending data by all types of lodging (hotels, vacation rentals and vacationers staying with friends and family); however, the company decided to make the DTI feature representative of “true demand” or all overnight stays, regardless of type.
The updates to Arrivalist’s free tool come just as another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic deals a blow to the U.S. travel industry.
Originally launched in April 2020, the DTI was built as a free tool to help the travel industry track the pulse of the sector’s recovery. It has been picked up by many industry associations and the U.S. government, and reportedly become the benchmark data set for U.S. road-trip travel trends. The DTI, and projections made from it, have been picked up by hundreds of media outlets since its inception.
Arrivalist calculates the data based on a representative balanced panel of GPS signals representing road trips taken specifically in cars (excluding travel by air). A trip is measured as one where the user has traveled a minimum of 50 miles and spent a minimum of two hours at the destination. Commuter travel or other frequently repeated trips—i.e., cargo deliveries or other recurring activities—are excluded from the DTI.
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