Place Informatics, the leading provider of footfall and location visitor behaviour data monitoring in the UK, has published a national visitor data report giving a detailed overview of town centre footfall across the UK.
The report gives detailed insights into how visitors to town centres have continued to decline in the first two months of 2024 following a 6-month decline in the second half of 2023.
The results highlight that town centres have seen fewer visitors in January and February of 2024 compared to the same months in 2023.
This trend follows a decline of 4.66% in the second half of 2023 which is now an 8-month continual decline in visitors across the UK of 1.43%.
The reduction in visitors to town centres that has been seen across the UK is due to multiple factors including bad weather and economic impacts such as the cost-of-living crisis.
The report explores the footfall dynamics both nationally and across 12 regions in the UK for the year 2023, with a specific emphasis on analysing fluctuations in foot traffic every month with a comparative analysis of footfall data from the previous year.
The data shows a worrying trend for town centres with footfall dropping across every region in 2024 but certain regions saw a steeper decline with the South-West seeing the largest decline of 6.64%. The South-West was followed by East Anglia with a decline of 4.78%, East Midlands at 3.33% and the North-East seeing a reduction in visitors of 3.31%.
Since 2015, Place Informatics has been at the vanguard of foot traffic data, answering business-critical questions about people’s interactions with various spaces such as town centres, retail outlets, tourist attractions, heritage sites, green spaces, events, and car parks. By harnessing the power of cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and machine learning, the ‘big data’ solutions are helping to revolutionise the industry.
Clive Hall, CEO of Place Informatics, said, “Our visitor behaviour data report shows some concerning trends across the UK. 2023 started positively with a significant increase in footfall across UK town centres but was followed by a sharp decline towards the end of the year and this has continued into the first two months of 2024.
“The results are worrying, especially for certain regions of the UK and local councils and businesses need to understand what caused this decline and how they can ensure this doesn’t continue in 2024.
“Our data can help retailers, hospitality, councils and many other businesses and services understand how visitors are behaving, where visitors come from and most importantly what services they are utilising on their visit, including green spaces, car parks and public realms.”
