All scales reported ADR growth over March 2019, ranging from +2.8% (upscale) to +26.8% (luxury) despite occupancy declines across the board. Upscale (+1.6%), upper midscale (+4.1%) and midscale (+1.0) properties posted demand growth, but each are competing with an influx of supply (+10.5%, +8.4% and +3.6%, respectively) which offsets any potential occupancy gains. Upper upscale showed the worst RevPAR decline (-8.4%), driven down by a 12.1% demand decline coupled with 4.6% growth in supply.
After a record-breaking year for IPOs in 2021, so far 2022 has been off to a slower start. Instacart is one of the most highly anticipated IPOs for investors this year, but in March, the grocery delivery startup cut its valuation by almost 40 percent, citing market conditions. Alternative data from Bloomberg Second Measure shows that while Instacart sales are still higher compared to pre-pandemic levels, its year-over-year sales growth and average sales per customer are declining. However, Instacart is continuing to see sales growth in some metro areas like Dallas, Philadelphia, and New York.
Digital advertisers in the fintech industry are paying up for creative spots. Pathmatics data reveals that in Q1 2022, PayPal, Starling Bank, and Lloyds Banking were the top three advertisers by ad spend. Our new State of Fintech Advertising report, available now as a free download, analyzes the top fintech trends and advertisers in the United Kingdom between Q1 2019 and Q1 2022. In the Point-of-Sale (POS) System & Services category, PayPal’s POS ad spending increased 570 percent from less than $2 million in 2019 to $13 million in 2021.
Last week, our CE Transact US data caught the decline in Netflix subscribers, with the company’s report of the first decline in ten years causing the stock to lose more than a third of its value. As the streaming platform cuts content and begins a plan to become more aggressive about cracking down on shared accounts, will the declines continue? In today’s Insight Flash, we review the tools provided in the CE Transact dataset for tracking Netflix usage, including how to understand the impacts of reduced account sharing.
The North American rail equipment fleet maintained its total size during the first quarter of 2022. The total equipment count was 2,073,438, for a change of 0 percent. The four largest segments during the quarter were Covered Hoppers (29 percent), Tank Cars (22 percent) and Gondolas and Intermodal (10 percent). Five car groups increased from the last quarter, led by Box Cars and Gondolas, up 1.0 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively. Hoppers and Covered Hoppers led declines, both down 0.5 percent.
From pizza companies to burger chain upstarts such as Shake Shack, quick-service restaurants have seen their sales grow during the pandemic. Bloomberg Second Measure transaction data shows that this has also been the case with major fast food chains such as McDonald’s (NYSE: MCD) and Wendy’s (NASDAQ: WEN). Additionally, McDonald’s and Wendy’s, as well as Burger King, owned by Restaurant Brands International (NYSE: QSR), are seeing increased average transaction values.
The coffee space performed very well in 2021, with foot traffic back to pre-pandemic levels for much of 2021. In recent months, however, the Omicron surge, rising prices, and ongoing economic uncertainty has put a dent in the sector’s fairytale recovery. We dove into recent visit data for Starbucks, Dutch Bros., and Dunkin’ to understand where the coffee category stands today. Starbucks and Dunkin’ visits essentially recovered in the second half of 2021, before dropping again in early 2022 as a result of Omicron.
Would you take it if someone offered you $3b for something you started building two years ago? Literally everyone on the planet would likely accept that offer—everyone except Evan Spiegel, co-founder of Snapchat, who infamously turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s offer to buy his then-two-year-old app for a whopping $3b. Almost a decade later, it’s clear that Spiegel knew what he had and that $3b was just a drop—no, a penny—in the bucket. Snap Inc.’s (Snapchat’s parent company) current market cap is closing in on $50b and Spiegel is worth more than $6b. How did Snapchat get there?
Welcome to the May 2022 Apartment List National Rent Report. Rent growth is continuing to pick up steam again, after a brief winter cooldown, with our national index up by 0.9 percent over the course of April. So far this year, rents are growing more slowly than they did in 2021, but faster than the growth we observed in the years immediately preceding the pandemic. Year-over-year rent growth currently stands at a staggering 16.3 percent, but most of that growth took place last spring and summer.
In order to deal with increased prices due to inflation, consumers have modified their spending habits, and are choosing lower-cost alternatives to help them stick to their budgets. Trends over the past 24-months seem to indicate that consumers are more likely to substitute products/services or procure them from less expensive sources than do away with them altogether. Shopping at retail liquor outlets instead of going out to restaurants seems to reflect this consumer switching behavior.
Buy-Now-Pay-Later, commonly referred to as BNPL, has quickly emerged as a popular payment option for retail and other major discretionary spend categories. Providing both the benefit of convenience and deeper integration with merchants and websites, consumers has been availing themselves of BNPL payment options during checkout. This type of financing has been more commonly used for big-ticket items such as cars and furniture , but now has become more broadly used for other smaller ticket purchases such as apparel.
The United States has some of the best graduate programs and, unsurprisingly, attracts some of the brightest people around the world. But the US has a big problem – it loses 1 out of 3 students it attracts. With the news that the America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed in both the House and Senate, which includes exemptions for international PhDs with STEM degrees from annual green card limits, we decided this week to take a deep dive into the international enrollment in the US graduate programs and see where these coveted students continue their careers after graduation.
In this Placer Bytes, we dive into the recent performances of RBI, Bloomin’ Brands, and Yum! Brands – three companies operating some of the biggest dining concepts in the United States. Following a difficult 2020 for in-location visits, many restaurant concepts – including Popeyes, Tim Hortons, Burger King, and Firehouse Subs – saw their foot traffic increase in 2021. Between July ‘21 and February ‘22, monthly visits for all four RBI brands analyzed were up by double digits compared to the equivalent month in the previous year.
Last week’s Northeastern snowstorm may have come as a surprise to some shoppers, but not CE WeatherOptics subscribers! WeatherOptics predicted disruption from the storm well in advance of the event, and in today’s Insight Flash, we dig into which businesses were most disrupted in the Syracuse-Auburn CSA and how disruption impacted nationwide sales for Eventbrite. Among the businesses seeing the most negative sales impact due to the storm, Frontier Airlines saw fewer shoppers booking flights to a snowbound destination.
The mobile app has had a huge impact on finance. The underbanked want access. The rest want convenience. And the way people shop, pay, save, borrow, and invest has been utterly transformed by the smartphone. This revolution came in two stages. The first saw the arrival of mobile banking apps, which let people check balances, make transfers, and organize their budgets – all without the need to visit a branch. The second big innovation was in payments. With the emergence of contactless and QR code functionality, the phone became a wallet as well as a bank.
I didn’t meet my husband the “old fashioned way” in a bar. Nope. We met on Tinder. While some may be surprised I found love on a dating app, it’s definitely not the exception to the norm anymore. The online dating industry grew 15.6% in 2021. People worldwide hoping to connect with that special someone are looking to technology to give them a hand. Case in point: There were almost three billion total visits to dating and relationship websites so far in 2022.
This earnings season, big tech equates to cars, baseball, and social media giants. It’s getting interesting. Does Tesla (TSLA) qualify as big tech? When you get into a Tesla, it’s like sitting inside of a computer. But instead of a VR experience, you actually get to drive – or not, if you prefer autopilot. Then there’s Elon Musk’s current play for Twitter (TWTR) to “unleash the social media giant’s full potential” (his words). But the real story is how Twitter is handling its change in leadership and comparing it to its competitors. Speaking of, how is META (Facebook) handling its first decrease in users reported in 4Q21?
With Q1 2022 behind us, we dove into foot traffic data to find out how CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid were performing. Walgreens and CVS both saw big successes during 2021, and foot traffic to both brands is still ahead of where it was pre-pandemic; visits the week of April 11th were up 11.8% and 8.8% for Walgreens and CVS, respectively, compared to the equivalent week in 2019. Still, there does appear to be a dip in visits since the beginning of 2022, which could be due to waning numbers of COVID and reduced demand for tests and vaccines.
McDonald’s foot traffic is now on par with pre-pandemic visit levels, but that doesn’t mean that consumer habits have returned to where they were in 2019. We dove into the latest data to find out how McDonald’s consumer behavior has changed since the pandemic. McDonald’s started out 2021 with a larger Yo2Y visit gap than the nationwide category average and remained behind the wider QSR sector throughout the first half of the year. But in July, as the wider dining recovery accelerated, the visit gap to McDonald’s also narrowed significantly.
With the grand and young population, the Philippines digital economy is emerging to be one of the fastest growing among its peers in Southeast Asia and is touted to become the next asia tiger economy. Previously, we’ve shared the food delivery landscape in many markets across southeast asia. This time, we’re going to look deeper into the competition between Foodpanda and Grab in the islands of Philippines. Who’s winning and what’s the latest score?
