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Our latest white paper, Who’s in the Stands? An In-Depth Look at Arena and Stadium Visits, uses location intelligence tools to uncover the demographic and psychographic characteristics of sporting events attendees – including Super Bowl fans. Below is a taste of our findings. For the full report, click here.
As the biggest game of the year, the Super Bowl usually brings a tourism boom to the host city. The heat map below depicts the origins of travelers to the past three Super Bowls (excluding Super Bowl LV in 2021 which was held under COVID restrictions). Year after year, the distribution of Super Bowl attendees is relatively similar to the country’s population distribution – which means, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the most densely populated regions are well-represented at the game.
But the data also reveals that many Super Bowl attendees travel from the regions where the competing teams are based, which indicates that die-hard fans are willing to make the trip to see their local team potentially win a championship. The map also shows that visitors from the Super Bowl’s host city and surrounding areas are heavily represented at the game, regardless of whether or not a local team is playing. It’s likely that a significant number of football fans who live nearby take advantage of the rare opportunity to see a Super Bowl close to home.
Super Bowl LVI in 2022, for example, was played at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, CA between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Los Angeles Rams. The event was heavily visited by fans from Southern California as the game was not only being played by the LA Rams, but also at their home stadium in Inglewood, CA. A greater contingent than previous years was also in attendance from Cincinnati, OH and its surrounding areas.
Many fans travel to the Super Bowl from the same regions every year, with the host city and the contending teams’ hometowns also providing significant factions of attendees. But analyzing Super Bowl crowds throughout the years also reveals an important demographic shift taking place among those traveling to the Super Bowl – the growing number of family-oriented visitors.
Since 2019, the True Trade Areas of the Super Bowl stadiums include increasingly greater shares of larger families. Last year’s Super Bowl LVI had an in-person audience that reflected a trade area in which 17.9% of residents came from families of five or more, up from 11.9% at the Super Bowl three years prior. Conversely, Super Bowl attendees in 2022 reflected a trade area in which 37.7% of residents were part of two-person households, a decrease from 47.8% in 2019.
The increase in attendees from areas with larger families could reflect the NFL’s initiatives to make football a more family-friendly sport, including rule and equipment changes aimed at increasing player safety and supporting youth football clubs. The trend towards an increase in attendees from larger families may also inform decisions about products to promote as well as amenities that will contribute to a family-friendly experience on game day.
Brands invest heavily in ads that air during the Super Bowl. But with the right insights, stadium advertising platforms have tremendous potential to reach target audiences in-person at the big game. While a large audience is part of the equation, in order to achieve maximum impact, an in-depth understanding of visitors is critical.
For more insights into sports events attendees, read the full report here.
Key McDonald's Metrics
While focus and streamlined operations are key to restaurant growth strategies, we also continue to see evidence of the impact of innovation and nostalgia in driving visits. McDonald’s has had success with its past celebrity meal collaborations with Travis Scott and J Balvin, with our data indicating a mid-to-high teens lift in visits compared to the weeks prior to the promotion. However, McDonald’s "Adult Happy Meal" collaboration with streetwear brand Cactus Plant Flea Market might be its most successful collaboration today, with data suggesting more than a 30% increase in in-store visitation trends compared to the weeks leading up to the promotion (below). We’ve discussed the impact of limited-time offers (LTO) in the QSR space earlier this year, but McDonald’s has set a new bar for the industry (beating out Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza launch in May).
Although QSR chains saw more resilient visitation trends than other restaurant categories for much of 2022, the gap between the QSR, fast casual, and full-service restaurant chains had narrowed in September as lower-income consumers continue to face inflationary headwinds from menu price hikes across the QSR space while higher-end consumers continue to dine out. Nevertheless, the impact of McDonald’s adult happy meal promotion is evident in not only the massive spike in visitation trends for the full QSR sector last week (below). While not everyone may love these promotions, they can be an extremely effective way to drive visitation growth.
We, the founding team, always loved data - ideating around it, engineering with it, understanding the world better with it.
But what captivated us most was imagining data products that can be used by tens of thousands of businesses across the world.
Among all the ideas and visions we bounced around before starting the company, one stood out for its simplicity and potential impact - building a ‘Physical Market Intelligence Platform’ to provide everyone in the offline world (a.k.a the ‘real world’) with aggregate insights for decision-making. Or in layman’s terms, “a dashboard to get instant insights for any place to understand its audience, surroundings, and competition”.
In 2016, the Placer founding team gathered in a basement and spent a weekend sketching out a plan to turn this idea into a massive world-class data company.
Whiteboarding without customers or tech debt is fun!!!
The more paper we stuck to that basement wall, the bigger the vision became! Everything is possible with the stroke of a pen…
But very quickly, we hit some glaring challenges:
The best way to approach a big challenge is breaking it down into smaller ones. So we worked hard to define Phase 1 - focusing on building a product that (1) was centered around the mobile location analytics dataset and (2) generated reports tailored for CRE and retail.
5 years and 5 funding rounds later, we’re FINALLY feeling “pretty good” about Phase 1: we launched a world-class mobile analytics product that’s used by over 1,000 customers, and thousands more are using our free products.
But it’s also been “frustrating” - we were always strapped for cash and resources. We’re yet to integrate most of the datasets we need; key reports for certain verticals remain in the product pipeline; and in terms of usability and workflow features, we still have a lot to do in order to create a truly comprehensive platform (vs “read only” status insights tool).
That’s why the $100M Series C funding we just announced is so momentous for me and the rest of the Placer team. It finally removes the shackles and equips us with the tools and materials we need for Phase 2 - rapidly building the full Placer.ai Market Intelligence Platform.
So let’s dive into what that means…
A Physical Market Intelligence Platform is a big data puzzle. Piecing it together - in a nutshell - consists of four phases:
A vast amount of interconnected data is required to create a truly accurate and complete picture of what’s going on at a location. This data falls into two broad categories:
Now consider all things you see going on in the world and imagine how POI and geospatial data can capture and quantify them…
Here’s a snippet:
We track dozens of data categories and thousands of datasets and vendors in order to identify new data that can help answer our customers’ questions.
This is 50% of our work and is a huge data challenge - but also great fun!
Through partnerships and our App Marketplace, we’ve recently integrated online reviews, credit card data, demographics, vehicle traffic volume, crime figures and planned construction into our platform. And we have lots more datasets in our pipeline: retail sales, property sales, financial data, leasing comparisons and climate data to name just a few.
If the data are the ingredients, then ingestion is the cooking. This includes complex data science processes:
Tagging data to POIs is a massive task. Placer’s POI database contains millions of entities: a commercial real estate asset in a customer’s portfolio; stores of a retailer’s chain or that hold a CPG brand’s products; a billboard used for out-of-home advertising; a downtown area being regenerated by a municipality or business improvement district. We geofence each one so data can be tagged to it.
But a much greater complexity than the volume of data-POI matching is the fact that our data structure is mutable - it changes. Stores, restaurants, strip malls and other POIs open, close, merge and move. Our physical environment is constantly changing. One of our platform’s standout attributes is that it always reflects historical change.
In practice, this means that, for each POI change, we not only adjust our data tagging but also re-tag 5 years of historical data to ensure any historical comparisons are “like with like”. This is a huge investment of resources on the part of our data science, devops and engineering teams - exponentially increasing our data management burden.
To complete the cooking metaphor, after selecting ingredients (datasets) and cooking them (data ingestion), we then lay out a buffet-style feast of solutions for our users:
The most basic level of the platform is converting the data into real-world constructs that can be understood by industry professionals: tables, charts, maps and other graphics displaying cross shopping, trade areas (below), cannibalization, risk analysis, visit frequency and so on.
A key tenet of the Market Intelligence Platform is the approach that insights like those are often not the answer to the questions that our customers are looking for. Rather, they are just part of the explanation behind the answer. That means providing a comprehensive suite of Solutions SUPPORTED by insights, not just a library of uncontextualized insights.
An excellent example of this is Void Analysis. A key question for retail real estate is “who is my ideal tenant?” While our platform offered important insights (such as retailers’ average monthly foot traffic and cannibalization) for reaching an answer, landlords were doing a lot of legwork. The Void Analysis tool we released late last year enables CRE professionals to instantly analyze thousands of potential tenants through automatically generated reports that include ranking according to our unique Relative Fit Score. This significantly improves the speed and scope of a search for new tenants.
We are now working on the many additional solutions like Void Analysis in our development pipeline - sales forecasting, site selection for retail chains, market selection, market change reports, product optimization for CPG to name a few.
To be truly useful, solutions must also be delivered in a way that fits various users’ workflows. A dashboard is a good start, but a full platform must offer a range of access points. This means data feeds, REST APIs, and other methods of programmatic access.
We’ll also add to that a rich layer of data exploration tools such as GIS, templates, graph builders, pivot table functionality and advanced entity search. This will provide users with maximum flexibility in how they explore and visualize our data.
The lion’s share of the work is still ahead of us here - more widgets, third party integrations, report generators, scheduled intelligence reports and alerts, and much more.
The platform’s user interface must be fully customized to fit the needs of its different user types across verticals AND within companies (business users, data scientists, data analysts, third party users). An example of how we’ve begun to do this is a portfolio overview section for CRE analysts to rapidly scan properties’ performance metrics. Another is our COVID-19 Recovery Dashboard, particularly used by civic organizations to assess the impact of the pandemic on local economic areas.
As we presented “just data”, we quickly realized some customers were looking for humans to add a “research layer” and context around the data. So an analytical research team has become part of the product. They capture and present key market intelligence, respond to the latest industry trends and customer interests. “The Anchor”, a weekly CRE executive intelligence report launched last September, has now become an inbox staple for many of our customers.
To our current understanding, we’re just “5%” of the way to our Market Intelligence Platform vision. The remaining 95% will be built by scaling POI coverage, datasets, answering more questions and developing the other core components of the platform.
So our focus now is on ramping up the velocity of this development. And to do that, we need even more of the world’s best talent across the company.
So, during 2022, we will use our new capital to double the size of our engineering team and significantly expand the data at our disposal. In parallel, we will also channel more resources to supporting our customers and contributing to industry understanding through our analytical research department and educational content.
Placer.ai is committed to transforming the way real-world businesses make decisions. And we don’t want to waste any time going about it.
LOS ALTOS, CA (January 12, 2021)--Placer.ai, the leader in location analytics and foot traffic data, announced today the closing of a $100M Series C funding round at a $1B valuation. The round was led by Josh Buckley with participation from WndrCo, Lachy Groom, MMC Technology Ventures LLC, Fifth Wall Ventures, JBV Capital, and Array Ventures. The round also included the participation of leading commercial real estate investors and operators, including J.M. Schapiro (Continental Realty Corp), Eliot Bencuya and Jeff Karsh (Tryperion Partners), Daniel Klein (Klein Enterprises/Sundeck Capital), Majestic Realty, and others. The funding will be used to expand the company’s R&D capabilities to further increase the pace of innovation.
“Placer experienced significant growth during 2021 as a consensus formed across the market that accurate, reliable consumer behavior analytics is indispensable to brick and mortar decision-making,” said Noam Ben-Zvi, CEO and Co-Founder of Placer.ai. “Yet, location analytics is just the foundation for a much broader and more comprehensive vision. With this funding, we will accelerate the development of the Placer.ai platform, adding an unprecedented range of new data sets - such as vehicle traffic, planned construction, web traffic, purchase data, and much more - as well as more advanced solutions to empower any professional with a stake in the physical world to make better decisions, faster than ever before. ”
Since launching in November 2018, Placer.ai has been adopted by over 1,000 customers including industry leaders in commercial real estate and retail like JLL, Regency Centers, Taubman, Planet Fitness, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and Grocery Outlet. In the wake of COVID-driven upheaval, the company saw widespread adoption among a series of new categories, among them hedge funds and CPG leaders including Tyson Foods and Reckitt Benckiser.
"Placer provides instant, simple and actionable insights to questions we've been asking as operators for over 30 years. The pace of innovation, the unique trust that the company has developed, and the massive market demand all point to the magnitude and scale of what this team can achieve,” said Jeffrey Katzenberg, Founding Partner of WndrCo.
"We have long felt like the disruption Placer can bring is massive, but the market demand has far exceeded our initial expectations," said Josh Buckley. “We see a powerful opportunity to continue partnering with Placer to improve the way decisions are made in the physical world, fundamentally improving the way these businesses and organizations operate."
Try Placer.ai for free here.
About Placer.ai:
Placer.ai is the most advanced foot traffic analytics platform allowing anyone with a stake in the physical world to instantly generate insights into any property for a deeper understanding of the factors that drive success. Placer.ai is the first platform that fully empowers professionals in retail, commercial real estate, hospitality, economic development, and more to truly understand and maximize their offline activities. Find more information here: https://placer.ai/
LOS ALTOS, CA (April 27, 2021) --Placer.ai, the leader in location analytics and foot traffic data, announced today the close of a $50M Series B funding round. The round was led by Josh Buckley, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra, with participation from Fifth Wall, JBV Capital and Aleph VC. The funding will be used to grow the company’s R&D, expand sales and marketing teams, introduce additional reports and data sets, and grow the recently announced marketplace.
Since launching in November 2019, Placer.ai has been adopted by over 500 customers including industry leaders in Commercial Real Estate and Retail like JLL, Brixmor, Taubman, Planet Fitness, and Dollar General. Yet, the recent upheaval caused by COVID led to widespread adoption among a series of new categories including Hedge Funds and CPG leaders.
“As a business deeply rooted in offline retail, we expected COVID to present a unique challenge. Yet, adoption actually increased as a result of our ability to introduce certainty into such an uncertain environment. The result has been a clearer and deeper understanding by the market of the absolute imperative of location data to improve the decision-making process,” said Placer.ai CEO and Co-Founder Noam Ben-Zvi.
“But our current offering is just the beginning, and we are fully focused on expanding the capabilities both through the development of a range of new features and tools, and the integration of a wide range of data sets through our marketplace. Placer.ai is rapidly becoming the market intelligence platform for anyone with a stake in the physical world.”
In the last year, Placer.ai continued to expand its presence in core markets like Commercial Real Estate, Retail, Municipal governments, and Hospitality while advancing into new segments like CPG and Hedge Funds. The result has been growing market adoption and an increasingly large and diverse reach.
"Fifth Wall has some of the largest owners and operators of real estate as our limited partners and several were customers of Placer.ai, giving us a unique perspective on the company’s growth and potential. We saw firsthand the impact that the data is already having in reimagining the way business is done in retail and real estate broadly,” said Kevin Campos, Partner on the Retail & Consumer Investment team at Fifth Wall. “Yet, what’s even more exciting is that we’re still only seeing a piece of the puzzle and know that there are so many other sectors where the data can be applied. We’re thrilled to help grow and execute this vision alongside this exceptional team.”
"Placer allows businesses that operate offline to make data-driven decisions, fundamentally improving the way they operate. This is the same type of tooling that online businesses have used to grow, moving from hunches to definitive answers," said Josh Buckley. “I'm excited to be partnering with the company's next phase of growth and product development."
“Our journey with Placer.ai started at the very beginning as one of the company's first beta customers. Seeing the disruptive power of the product up close, the speed at which the company developed new features, and the tremendous traction they achieved in the marketplace led us to invest less than a year later and in every round since," said Sandy Sigal, CEO of NewMark Merrill Companies, an owner and developer of over 80 shopping centers and Chairman of BrightStreet Ventures, their venture capital arm. "Several years later, the customer growth, their ongoing product development, and the continuing value they have brought to our organization has only deepened our conviction and makes continued support a no-brainer for us."
Learn more about Placer.ai.
1. Idaho and South Carolina have emerged as significant domestic migration magnets over the past four years. Between January 2021 and 2025, both states gained over 3.0% of their populations through domestic migration. Other Mountain and Sun Belt states – including Nevada, Montana, and Florida – also drew significant inflow, while California, New York, and Illinois experienced the greatest outmigration.
2. Interstate migration cooled noticeably in 2024. During the 12-month period ending January 2025, California, New York and Illinois saw their outflows slow dramatically, while domestic migration hotspots like Georgia, Texas, and Florida saw inflows flatten to zero. A similar cooling trend emerged on a CBSA level.
3. Still, some states continued to see notable relocation activity over the past year. In 2024, Idaho, South Carolina, and North Dakota drew the most relocators relative to their populations. And among the nation’s ten largest states, North Carolina led with an inflow of 0.4%.
4. Phoenix remained a rare bright spot among the nation’s ten largest metro areas. The CBSA was the only major analyzed hub to maintain positive net domestic migration through 2024.
Over the past several years, the United States has experienced significant domestic migration shifts, driven by factors like remote work, housing affordability, and regional economic opportunities. As some areas reap the benefits of population inflows, others grapple with outflows tied to higher living costs and evolving workplace dynamics.
This report dives into the location analytics to explore where Americans have moved since 2021 – and how these patterns began to change in 2024.
Since 2021, Americans have flocked toward warmer climates, expansive natural scenery, and more affordable housing options – particularly in the Mountain and Sun Belt states.
Between January 2021 and January 2025, South Carolina led the nation in positive net domestic migration – drawing an influx of newcomers equivalent to 3.6% of its January 2025 population. (This metric is referred to as a state’s “net migrated percent of population.”) Next in line was Idaho with a 3.4% net migrated percent of population, followed by Nevada, (2.8%), Montana (2.8%), Florida (2.1%), South Dakota (2.1%), Wyoming (2.0%), North Carolina (2.0%), and Tennessee (1.9%). Texas saw positive net migration of just 0.9% during the same period. However, the Lone Star State’s large overall population means a substantial number of newcomers in absolute terms.
Meanwhile, California (-2.2%), New York (-2.1%), and Illinois (-1.9%) experienced the greatest outflows relative to their populations. This exodus was driven largely by soaring housing costs and the rise of remote work, which lowered barriers to moving out of high-priced areas.
Between January 2024 and January 2025, many of the same broad patterns persisted, but at a more moderate clip – suggesting a stabilization of domestic migration nationwide. This leveling off could reflect factors such as rising mortgage interest rates, which dampened home buying and selling, as well as the increased push for employees to return to the office.
Still, South Carolina (+0.6%) and Idaho (+0.6%) remained among the top inflow states. The two hotspots were joined – and slightly surpassed – by North Dakota (+0.8%), where even modest waves of newcomers make a big impact due to the state’s lower population base. A wealth of affordable housing and a strong job market have positioned North Dakota as a particularly attractive destination for U.S. relocators in recent years. And Microsoft and Amazon’s establishment of major presences around Fargo has strengthened the region’s economy.
Meanwhile, California (-0.3%), New York (-0.2%), and Illinois (-0.1%) continued to post negative net migration, but at a markedly slower rate than in prior years. And notably, several states that had been struggling with outflow, such as Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia, Ohio, and Oregon, began showing minor positive inflow during the same 12-month window. As home affordability erodes in pandemic-era hot spots like the Mountain states and Sun Belt, these areas may emerge as new destinations for Americans seeking lower costs of living.
Zooming in on the ten most populous U.S. states offers an even clearer picture of how domestic migration patterns have stabilized over the past year. The graph below shows a side-by-side comparison of domestic migration patterns during the 36-month period ending January 2024 and the 12-month period ending January 2025.
California, New York, and Illinois saw population outflows slow dramatically during the 12 months ending January 2025 – while domestic migration magnets such as Georgia, Texas, and Florida saw inflow flatten to zero. Meanwhile, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania flipped from slightly negative to slightly positive net migration – incremental upticks that could signal a possible turnaround.
The only “Big Ten” pandemic-era migration magnet to maintain strong inflow in 2024 was North Carolina – which saw a 0.4% influx in 2024 as a result of interstate moves.
A closer look at the top four states receiving outmigration from California and New York (October 2020 to October 2024) reveals that residents leaving both states tended to settle in nearby areas or in Florida.
Among those leaving New York, 37.4% ended up in neighboring states – 21.1% moved to New Jersey, 9.2% to Pennsylvania, and 7.1% to Connecticut. But an astonishing 28.8% decamped all the way to the Sunshine State, trading the Northeast’s colder climate for Florida sunshine.
Similarly, 20.1% of California leavers chose to stay nearby, moving to Nevada (11.5%) or Arizona (8.6%). Another 19.1% moved to Texas, and 8.0% moved to Florida, making it the fourth-largest destination for Californians.
Zooming in on CBSA-level data – focusing on the nation’s ten largest metropolitan areas, all with over five million people – reveals a similar picture of slowing domestic migration over the last year.
Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. – four cities that experienced notable population outflows between January 2021 and January 2024 – saw those outflows flatten considerably. For these metros, this leveling-off may serve as a promising sign that the waves of departures seen in recent years may have begun to subside. Conversely, Houston and Dallas, which both welcomed positive net migration between January 2021 and January 2024, registered zero-net domestic migration in 2024. Atlanta, for its part, remained flat in both of the analyzed periods.
In Miami, however, outmigration persisted at a substantial rate. Despite Florida’s overall status as a domestic migration magnet, Miami lost 2.6% of its population to domestic net migration between January 2020 and January 2024 – and another 1.0% between January 2024 and January 2025. As one of Florida’s most expensive housing markets, Miami may be losing some residents to other parts of the state or elsewhere in the region. Meanwhile, Philadelphia, which lost 0.3% of its population to net domestic migration between January 2021 and January 2024, continued losing residents at a slightly faster pace in 2024 – another 0.3% just last year.
Of the ten biggest CBSAs nationwide, only Phoenix continued to see a net domestic migration gain through 2024 (+0.2%). This highlights the CBSA’s continued draw as a (relative) relocation hotspot even in 2024’s cooling market.
Who are the domestic relocators heading to Phoenix?
From October 2020 to October 2024, the top five metro areas sending residents to the Phoenix CBSA each registered median household incomes (HHIs) of $73K to $98K – surpassing Phoenix’s own median of $72K. This suggests that many of those moving in are arriving from wealthier, often more expensive metro areas – for whom even Phoenix’s high-priced market may offer more affordable living.
Overall, domestic migration patterns appear to have cooled in 2024, reflecting economic and societal trends that have slowed the rush from pricey coastal hubs to more affordable regions. Yet states like South Carolina, Idaho, and North Dakota – as well as metro areas like Phoenix – continue to attract new arrivals, paving the way for evolving regional demographics in the years to come.
In today’s retail landscape, consumer behavior is influenced by a multitude of factors, directly impacting the success of products and brands. This report explores the latest trends in value perception, shopping behavior, and media consumption that impact which brands consumers are most likely to engage with – and how.
In the apparel space, consumers continue to prioritize value and unique merchandise.
Analysis of visits to various apparel categories reveals a steady increase in the share of visits going to off-price retailers and thrift stores at the expense of traditional apparel chains.
And the popularity of off-price chains and thrift stores appears to be widespread across multiple audience segments. Analyzing trade area data with the Experian: Mosaic psychographic dataset reveals a clear preference for second-hand retailers among both younger (ages 25-30) and older (51+) consumer segments. Meanwhile, middle-class parents aged 36-45 with teenagers – the “Family Union” segment – are significantly more likely to shop at off-price apparel stores, highlighting their emphasis on buying new, while saving both time and money.
This suggests that the powerful blend of treasure-hunting and deep value, central to both the off-price and thrift experiences, is driving traffic from a variety of audiences, and that other industries could benefit from combining affordability with the allure of unique products.
Diving deeper into the location intelligence for the apparel space further highlights thrift and off-price’s broad appeal – and that a combination of quality and price motivates consumers to visit different retailers.
Between 2019 and 2024, the share of Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom visitors that also visited a Goodwill or Ross Dress for Less increased significantly.
And while this could mean that the current economic climate is causing some higher-income consumers to trade down to lower-priced retailers, it could also be that consumers are prioritizing sustainability and seeking value in terms of “bang for their buck” – shopping a combination of retailers depending on the cost versus quality considerations for each purchase.
Consumers increasingly expect to shop on their own terms, opting for a more flexible shopping experience that blurs the lines between traditional retail channels and categories.
Superstores and warehouse stores, for example, often evoke the image of navigating aisle after aisle of nearly every product imaginable – a time-consuming endeavor given the sheer size of their stores. But the latest location intelligence shows that more consumers are turning to these retailers for super-quick shopping trips.
Between 2019 and 2024, the share of visits lasting less than ten minutes at Target, Walmart, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Sam’s Club, and to a lesser extent Costco, rose steadily – perhaps due to increased use of flexible BOPIS (buy online, pick-up in-store) and curbside pick-up options. These stores may also be seeing a rise in consumers popping in to grab just a few items as-needed or to cherry-pick particular deals to complement their larger online shopping orders.
This trend highlights the demand for frictionless store experiences that allow visitors to conveniently shop or pick up orders even at large physical retailers.
And the breaking down of traditional retail silos isn’t limited to big-box chains. Diving into the data for quick service restaurants (QSR), fast casual chains, and grocery stores indicates that more consumers are also looking for new ways to grab a convenient bite.
Since 2019, grocery stores have been claiming an increasingly large share of the midday short visit pie – i.e. visits between 11:00 AM 3:00 PM lasting less than ten minutes – at the expense of QSR chains. This suggests that consumers seeking quick and affordable lunches are increasingly turning to grocery stores to pick up a few items or take advantage of self-service food bars. Notably, the rise in supermarket lunching hasn’t come at the expense of fast-casual restaurants, which have also upped their quick-service games – and have seen a small increase in their share of the quick lunchtime crowd over the past five years.
While some of QSR’s relative decline in short lunchtime visits could be due to discontent with rising fast-food prices, it’s clear that an increasing share of consumers see grocery and fast-casual chains as viable options during the lunch rush.
In 2025, tapping into hot trends and creating viral moments are among the most powerful tools for amplifying promotions and driving foot traffic to physical stores.
Retailers across categories have successfully harnessed the power of pop culture collaborations to generate excitement – and visits – by leaning into trending themes. On October 8th, 2024, for example, Wendy’s launched its epic Krabby Patty Collab, inspired by the beloved SpongeBob franchise. And during the week of the offering, the chain experienced a remarkable 21.5% increase in foot traffic compared to an average week that year.
Similarly, Crumbl – adept at creating buzz through manufactured scarcity – sparked a frenzy with the debut of its exclusive Olivia Rodrigo GUTS cookie. Initially available only at select locations near the artist’s concert venues, the cookie was launched nationwide for a limited time from August 19th to 24th, 2024. This buzz-driven release resulted in a 27.7% traffic surge during the week of the launch, as fans rushed to get a taste of the star-studded treat.
And it’s not just dining chains benefiting from these pop-culture moments. On February 16th, 2025, Bath & Body Works launched a Disney Princess-inspired fragrance line, perfect for fans of Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Moana, and Tiana. The collaboration resonated, fueling a 23.2% visit spike for the chain.
While tapping into existing pop-culture trends has the ability to drive traffic, so does creating a new one. Analysis of movie theater visits on National Popcorn Day (Sunday, January 19th, 2025) shows how initiating a trend can spur social media engagement and impact in-person traffic to physical retail spaces.
National Popcorn Day was a successful promotional holiday across the movie theater industry in 2025. Both Regal Cinemas and AMC Theatres offered popcorn-based promotions on the day, but Cinemark’s “Bring Your Own Bucket” campaign, in particular, appears to have spurred a significant foot traffic boost during the event.
Visits to Cinemark on National Popcorn Day in 2025 increased 57.5% relative to the Sunday visit average for January and February 2025, as movie-goers showed off their out-of-the-bucket popcorn receptacles on social media. Clearly, by starting a trend that invited creativity and expression, Cinemark was able to amplify the impact of its National Popcorn Day promotion.
Location intelligence illuminates some of the key trends shaping consumer behavior in 2025. The data reveals that value-driven shopping, demand for flexibility across touchpoints, and the power of unique retail moments have the power to drive consumer engagement and the success of retail categories, brands, and products.
Placer.ai observes a panel of mobile devices in order to extrapolate and generate visitation insights for a variety of locations across the U.S. This panel covers only visitors from within the United States and does not represent or take into account international visitors.
Downtown districts in the nation’s major cities attract domestic travelers all year long with their iconic sights, lively entertainment, and diverse dining offerings. But each hub follows its own rhythm, shaped by distinct seasonal peaks and dips in visitor flow.
This white paper examines downtown hotel visitation patterns in four of the nation’s most popular destinations for domestic tourists: Miami, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Focusing on 20 downtown hotels in each city, the analysis explores seasonal variations in domestic travel, city-specific dynamics, and differentiating factors.
Domestic tourism has rebounded strongly in recent years, and hotels in Miami and Chicago have been the biggest beneficiaries. In 2024, visits to analyzed hotels in each of these cities’ downtown areas grew by 8.9% and 7.4%, respectively, compared to 2023. Meanwhile, hotels in downtown and midtown Manhattan saw a more modest 2.0% increase, while Los Angeles experienced a slight year-over-year (YoY) decline in downtown hotel visits.
One factor that may be driving Miami and Chicago’s stronger performance is their higher proportion of long-distance visitors, defined as those visiting from over 250 miles away. Miami remains a top destination for snowbirds and spring breakers, while Chicago serves as a cultural and entertainment hub for the sprawling Midwest. These long-distance leisure travelers may be more likely to splurge on downtown hotel stays during their trips, helping drive hotel visit growth in the two cities.
By contrast, hotels in the Los Angeles and Manhattan city centers drew lower shares of domestic travelers coming from less than 250 miles away. These shorter-haul domestic tourists may be less likely to splurge on downtown hotels than those taking longer vacations. Both cities are also surrounded by numerous regional getaway options that can draw long-haul leisure travelers away from their downtown cores.
Each of the four analyzed cities has its own unique ebbs and flows – and city center hotel visits reflect these patterns. Miami, with its warm, sunny climate, experiences influxes of tourists during the winter and spring, with March seeing the biggest jump in downtown hotel visits last year (13.0% above the monthly visit average). Chicago, which thrives in the summer with its many festivals and events, saw its biggest downtown hotel visit bump in August. Meanwhile, Manhattan experienced a major uptick in December, likely fueled by holiday tourism and New Year celebrations, and Los Angeles visits were highest in the summertime.
What drives these seasonal visit peaks? Miami has long been a top tourism destination, especially in early spring, when snowbirds and spring breakers flock to the city for sun and relaxation. In recent years, the city has seen a rise in short-term domestic tourism, suggesting that the city is becoming increasingly popular for weekend getaways. According to the Placer.ai Tourism Dashboard, the share of domestic tourists staying just one or two nights grew from 71.7% in March 2022 to 78.3% in March 2024.
This shift aligns with an impressive increase in the magnitude of downtown Miami’s springtime hotel visit peak: In March 2022, visits to downtown hotels were 5.0% above the monthly average for the year, a share that more than doubled by 2024 to 12.9%.
These numbers may mean that more people are choosing to head to Miami for a quick break from the cold – and staying in downtown hotels to make the most of their short getaway.
Chicago’s major August visit spike was likely driven by the Windy City’s impressive lineup of major summer festivals, from Lollapalooza to the Chicago Air and Water Show, which draw thousands of attendees from across the country.
Lollapalooza fueled the largest visit spike to the city – between Thursday, August 1st and Sunday, August 4th, visits to downtown Chicago hotels surged between 51.1% and 63.8% above 2024 daily averages for those days of the week. The Air and Water Show and the Chicago Jazz Festival also generated significant hotel visit increases – highlighting the boost these events bring to the city’s tourism and hospitality sector.
The Big Apple draws a diverse mix of visitors throughout the year. But in December – the city’s peak tourist season – visitors pour in from all over the country to skate in Rockefeller Center, browse Fifth Avenue’s festive window displays and experience the city’s unique holiday magic.
And analyzing data from hotels in midtown and downtown Manhattan reveals a striking shift in the types of visitors who stay in the heart of NYC during the holiday season. While visitors from other urban centers dominated downtown hotel stays throughout most of the year – accounting for 47.9% of visits from January to November 2024 – their share dropped to 42.0% in December 2024. Meanwhile, the share of guests from suburban areas and small towns rose from 37.3% to 41.0%, and the share of guests from rural and semi-rural areas nearly doubled, from 3.5% to 6.1%.
These patterns suggest that, though Manhattan typically attracts a wide range of visitors, the holiday season is uniquely appealing to tourists from smaller towns and suburban areas. Understanding these trends can provide crucial context for hotels and civic stakeholders alike as they work to maximize the opportunities presented by the city’s December visit surge.
Los Angeles hotels also experience significant demographic shifts during peak season. In July, visits to downtown LA hotels surged by 15.3% relative to the 2024 monthly visit average. And a closer look at audience segmentation data suggests a corresponding surge in the share of "Flourishing Families" – an Experian: Mosaic segment consisting of affluent, middle-aged households with children. Throughout the year, "Flourishing Families" comprised between 7.7% and 8.7% of the census block groups (CBGs) driving visits to downtown LA hotels. But in July, this share jumped to 9.9%.
These families may be taking advantage of summer vacations to enjoy Los Angeles’ cultural attractions and entertainment. Hotels and city stakeholders who understand the appeal the city holds for this demographic can better cater to them through family-friendly promotions and strategic marketing efforts to target these households.
Downtowns are making a comeback – and hotels in the heart of the nation’s major tourist hubs are reaping the benefits. By understanding who frequents these downtown hotels and when, local businesses and civic leaders can optimize their resource management and strategic planning to make the most of these opportunities.
