The UK’s accommodation sector experienced its biggest surge in almost a year in the lead up to the Spring bank holiday, with geo-data revealing the scale of demand for domestic breaks. According to Huq’s Index, which measures the number of customers present in a range of sectors in comparison to the February 2020 average, visits to B&Bs, hotels and guest houses across the UK recovered 25pts post reopening in April, before jumping a further 60pts in the build up to the late May bank holiday.
Using our latest traffic pattern data, some interesting new travel trends emerged over the Memorial Day weekend (MDW) - the unofficial beginning of the summer season for many Americans on the go. We believe this pattern could be a leading indicator for consumer behavior as we move closer to Independence Day in July and the summer vacation period. We examined how many miles Americans drove on the Fridays leading into the MDW - this past Friday, May 28, compared to Friday, May 24, 2019, and Friday, May 29, 2020.
Office investment across Europe has plummeted since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Transaction volume fell by almost one-half in the year through March compared with the prior 12 months, and the number of traded assets fell to the lowest level since 2011. Moreover, the continent’s biggest institutions are pivoting away from the office as they embrace residential and industrial. In Europe during 2020, institutional players deployed 40% of their capital on offices – the lowest ever proportion for a calendar year.
Admittedly, the athleisure and athletic wear space was one where we expected to see a rapid and significant recovery. Yet, the magnitude and speed of the recovery deserve extra note because many of the brands that headline the sector are facing significant challenges that make the success all the more impressive. While sweatpants as work clothes may have picked up pace, the locations of many of these brands are mall or city based, making the wider recovery context more challenging. Yet, they recovered.
The pandemic raised new questions, new challenges, brought new opportunities, and accelerated the need for data-driven decisions across many industries. We recently teamed up with our partners at PwC to share our approach for enhancing existing demand models using multiple datasets and to show an example of how they’re built in the PwC ecosystem. We discussed from our respective points of view how demand changed, and how it can affect your planning.
Following last week’s lack of activity, airlines have been adding capacity back over the last seven days as the weird and wonderful world of commercial aviation continues its slow recovery. In a week when Qantas can offer pleasure flights to the moon but cannot cross more than the New Zealand border and where Wizz Air realised that competing in some domestic markets is not worth the hassle, global capacity grew by some 6.4% week-on-week.
National home prices increased 13% year over year in April 2021, according to the latest CoreLogic Home Price Index (HPI®) Report. The April 2021 HPI gain was up from the April 2020 gain of 4.6% and was the highest year-over-year gain since February 2006. Low mortgage rates and low for-sale inventory drove the increase in home prices. While a pick-up in construction and an increase in for-sale listings as more homeowners get vaccinated may help moderate surging home price growth, affordability challenges may drive some potential home buyers out of the market which could reduce demand.
When the UK’s restrictions are lifted on June 21, 2021, and a return to the office becomes a reality, as an agency or advertiser it could be very important to know how many people you are likely to reach on their commute with an online ad campaign. If I look only at a recent month of data, I would assume that circa 2m users visit the National Rail website or app in a month.
The pandemic has completely changed the trajectory of stocks and sectors. Whether we like it or not, coronavirus has sped up the world’s digital transformation by months or even years. “The move to digitization has accelerated, and the benefits will be permanent,” says KPMG’s global advisory head Carl Carande. “There is no going back.” With this in mind, we decided to zero in on the top 10 investing trends for 2021, covering everything from bitcoin and cryptocurrency to IPOs and SPACs.
The home improvement sector was a clear retail winner throughout the pandemic, but by late 2020 home goods brands like At Home and Floor & Decor were seeing similarly impressive levels of strength. The sector surged by riding a similar wave as a homebound audience was pushed to look for ways to improve their increasingly central surroundings and greater migration drove a need for new furnishings. And like the home improvement sector, home furnishings leaders saw that strength continue into 2021.
Though digital advertising has been around for years, we’re just getting to a point where individual print publications are seeing their digital sales consistently outpace their print sales. Meredith publications—the publisher of Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living, People, Real Simple and many other national lifestyle magazines—made $107 million on online advertising during Q1 2021. This is about $10 million more than their print sales.
Visits to the UK’s hospitality and restaurant sector went up by around a third (32%) in the week immediately following the re-opening of indoor hospitality on Monday 17 May. The data includes the first Saturday since restrictions were relaxed. The North West region saw the largest jump in activity, rising by an average of 39%. However, Greater London came dead last, showing a rise of only 22%.
Below, ETR recaps the datasets on leading vendors in the Data Warehousing, Productivity Apps, and Storage sectors. This article is based on ETR's Spring Technology Spending Intentions Survey (TSIS), which captures where IT budgets are being invested, citing participation from 1,500 IT decision-makers. Below are specific excerpts from each vendor's TSIS report, originally published on April 16th, 2021.
In 2020, when stay-at-home orders first went into effect and people began working, learning, playing, and eating all within the same four walls and time on our hands, what used to be bearable imperfections quickly became must fixes. With sit down restaurants, parks, movie theaters, and the like shut down, home improvement projects skyrocketed as people tried to transform their home into an oasis.
Months into 2021, housing supply remains at historically low levels while the impact from the pandemic and low mortgage interest rates linger. This has meant that some potential sellers are still holding on to their properties in fear of the virus while homebuyers are flooding the market, trying to capture the benefits of low mortgage interest rates. Together, these have shrunk the already small supply of available homes.
As the road to recovery continues, we looked at a leading indicator of returning to normal behavior: fitness spending and gym attendance. We also checked in on home fitness leader Peloton given its pandemic-driven spotlight. Note that parts of this analysis calculate growth relative to two years prior – written throughout as “Yo2Y” – in order to benchmark current performance against “normal” consumer levels.
Over the last several weeks, inflation concerns have been a hot topic, as the combination of increased demand as the country reopens, supply chain constraints and high commodity prices has pushed up prices across categories. Although categories like used cars and gas saw the most dramatic increases last month, CPG companies have felt the impact as well.
The headline rate of U.S. property price growth accelerated in April as the industrial, apartment, retail and office indices all posted positive annual returns for the first time since the pandemic began, the latest _RCA CPPI: US_ summary report shows. The U.S. National All-Property Index grew 8.4% in April over the last year. The laggard in April was the CBD office index.
In spite of pessimistic predictions made during the height of the pandemic, the fitness sector is experiencing an impressive offline recovery. And while the sector’s recovery pattern can undoubtedly be tied to an accelerated pandemic-influenced health trend, there is another significant contributor to its gradual growth in visits. Fitness brands are internalizing and quickly adapting to new challenges and shifts in consumer behavior patterns.
Not since the 60's has a nation had so much pent up tension and longing for intimate connection - and back then, the only place you could swipe right was a rotary phone. Now, love is just a click away! Well, except for that whole pandemic-quarantine thing? But all that is about to change. It's been a long year, and the dating apps are preparing for "single and ready to mingle" to transition into, "vaccinated and ready to get the hell out of my house and meet someone who hopefully looks like their profile picture!" Or, some version of that, anyway.
