Arrivalist Bolsters Smartphone Insights with Connected Car Data To Give Clients The Highest Quality Data

Travel data company will make both data sets available to its clients as part of its commitment to provide the most accurate year-over-year trending and increased accuracy

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Arrivalist, the leading location intelligence platform in the travel industry, today announced that it is providing insights from both connected car data and smartphone location data as part of its Calibrated Data™ offering. Calibrated data refers to the company’s patent-pending method of enriching location data sets by aligning them to the source of truth data.

Arrivalist confirmed that it will be the first company to power location intelligence insights by combining connected car and smartphone location data.

“Two datasets are always better than one, and they’re more accurate, too,” said Arrivalist Founder and CEO Cree Lawson. “After years of using connected car data to power our Daily Travel Index, we are adding this proven and trusted dataset into our patent-pending Calibrated Data™ offering. The connected car data will also be available independently to clients on Dec. 15 as part of Arrivalist’s Horizon, a new user interface designed to give clients the ability to make critical decisions instantly.”

By leveraging the best parts of two location datasets, the move gives clients dramatically richer, more actionable and consistent insights. Arrivalist’s investments in data diversity come at a time when some of the biggest mobile platforms have announced changes which are likely to have a disruptive impact on the consistency of location data signals. Arrivalist’s technology obscures any information that may be used to identify a person from their phone or car. All users have opted in to sharing their information and can opt-out at any time.

“For years, we’ve compared our location data to other sources of truth to confirm our accuracy,” said Lawson. “Connected car data started as a source of truth. Soon it became clear that the connected car data is much stronger at measuring customer loyalty and the duration of and consistency of travel. We’re measuring roughly one in every 15 cars on the road which gives clients these insights at scale.”

The company first introduced connected car data as part of its popular Daily Travel Index , a free resource that was deployed to measure the return of travel activity following the COVID-19 pandemic. The Daily Travel Index measures road trips of 50 or more miles taken from a panel of millions of connected cars and is updated every 48 hours.

Explore Georgia, which promotes tourism to and within the state of Georgia, was one of the first clients to add Arrivalist’s connected car insights to its Arrivalist data subscription so that it could have a multi-dimensional perspective on the impact of travel to neighboring states.

“Through shifts in travel patterns, traveler sentiment and approaches to measurement, Arrivalist’s data has been a constant for our state tourism office in the form of daily access to reliable trending data and actionable insights on consumer behavior,” said Georgia Department of Economic Development Deputy Commissioner for Tourism Mark Jaronski.

“Folks in the industry have asked how we measured travel so consistently over a two-year period without any impact from location collection practices tied to iOS 14 or the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA),” said Lawson. “The answer is simple: Connected car data isn’t currently affected by these measures. It’s the perfect yardstick to keep our smartphone insights aligned and accurate despite industry changes.”

Memphis Tourism has been another early adopter of the connected car data.

“Drive market visitation from nearby visitors is critical to our industry’s recovery from COVID-19,” said Ashley McHugh, research director at Memphis Tourism. “Being able to analyze aggregated auto movement gives us more accurate insight into drive market visitation patterns.”

“After 18 months of research, we’re determined that location data from connected cars affords users the same or greater privacy protection as smartphone location data,” said Lawson. “After 10 years in the business, it’s exciting to open a whole new chapter deriving aggregated, anonymized insights from multiple location data sources. We are not connecting cars and phones to individual users and will only be providing aggregated insights. Both datasets protect consumers by obscuring user level information at origin and arrival and by only providing aggregated results. Still, this offers marketers profoundly richer insights than from one dataset alone.”

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 120 travel marketers, including 100 Cities, 40 US States, and 4 of the top 10 US 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.

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Hannah Wootton

(307) 461-1064

hannah.wootton@bvk.com