研究 Travel for Business or Pleasure: Where does your city rank?

City and regional governments spend considerable time promoting their cities to 国际市场 whether for exports of goods or as a tourist destination. Overlooked is the importance of domestic visitors—business travelers, 游客, or day-trippers—who allow a metro area to extend its economic reach. Much as exports enable firms to reach new markets and consumers beyond their immediate surroundings, increasing the number of visitors to a metro area increases the number of potential customers. Visitors are important beyond the traditional tourist-centric sectors such as hotels or restaurants, with purchases extending into retail and entertainment amongst others. 利用来自12的数据.40亿年 匿名 credit and debit card transactions in 15 metropolitan areas, the 12bet官方 研究所's recently released Profiles of Local Consumer Commerce (PLCC) can help better explain spending by domestic visitors in metropolitan areas.

Across the fifteen metro areas, the average share of spending by nonresidents was 15.6 percent of total consumer spending. The average masks considerable variance across the cities, as shown in the table below. In Phoenix, nonresidents accounted for 23.0 percent of all local consumer commerce spending. This is nearly 17 percentage points higher than the city with the lowest share of spending by nonresidents, 休斯顿, where visitors only accounted for 6.支出的1%. Besides Phoenix, other cities at the top of the rankings include San Diego and Seattle.

Tourism is generally considered to be highly seasonal, with many destinations known for having peak and quiet periods. 然而, spending by out-of-towners across most cities remains stable throughout the year, as reflected in the fifteen city average.¹ 尽管相对稳定, two distinct seasonality patterns emerge: (1) across several cities, 尤其是圣地亚哥和丹佛, a slight increase in summer months; and (2) for two of the fifteen cities, 凤凰城和迈阿密, 在冬季的几个月里长出尖峰, reflecting the well-known migration to warm weather and so-called "snowbirds.“有趣的是, though the pattern is similar for both cities, the level share in Phoenix is considerably higher than that in Miami—in some months higher by 10 percentage points. 在下面的图表中, we show these patterns by plotting the share of spending by visitors in select metro areas between October 2013 and July 2015.

Visitors are only one part of local economies, but in most cities they represent a meaningful percent of local consumer commerce and thus can be an important market for firms looking to expand beyond the immediate residents of their metro area. The 12bet官方 研究所's new data series, Profiles of Local Consumer Commerce, enables better tracking of these data within and across metropolitan areas, and is a powerful tool for understanding consumer commerce and devising better policies to enable commerce.

The 12bet官方 研究所 is committed to delivering data-rich analyses and expert insights for the public good. 我们最近发布的报告 Profiles of Local Consumer Commerce tells the story of the decline in everyday retail spending across fifteen metro areas. 在接下来的五个星期, the JPMC 研究所 will explore the differences between the metro areas through a series of blog posts ranking the cities across select dimensions from the report.