NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Leading location data company Arrivalist estimates 51 million Americans will travel via automobile during the Thanksgiving holiday (Wednesday through Sunday). Volume is predicted to exceed 2019 road trips by 1.8 percent.
Arrivalist’s Daily Travel Index has been trending positively for the last four weeks, showing a five percent increase in road trip travel over 2019 and a seven percent increase compared to 2021 levels.
“Looming recession concerns and high airline ticket prices are driving travelers to hit the road this Thanksgiving,” said Arrivalist Founder and CEO Cree Lawson. “We expect this momentum to carry on throughout the 2022 holiday season. It will be exciting to see if 2022 road trip activity can beat the 2019 benchmark, as we have predicted.”
Daily Travel Index Origins
Originally launched in April 2020 in the nadir of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Daily Travel Index was built as a free tool to help the travel industry track the pulse of travel's recovery. It has been picked up by many industry associations and the U.S. government and become the benchmark data set for U.S. road trip travel trends. The Daily Travel Index, and projections made from it, have been picked up by hundreds of media outlets since its inception.
How the Data is Calculated
Arrivalist’s methodology is 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 travelled 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 reoccurring activities—are excluded from the Daily Travel Index.
About Arrivalist
Arrivalist is the leading location intelligence platform in the travel industry. The company uses multiple location data sets to provide actionable insights on consumer behavior, competitive share, media effectiveness, and market trends. Over 200 travel marketers, including 100 cities, 40 U.S. states, and four of the top 10 U.S. theme parks, use these insights to inform media strategy, operations, and destination development. Arrivalist is headquartered in New York City, with offices in San Francisco and Toronto.
