Identifying seasonal variations in store‐level visitor grocery demand

Abstract

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to understand the contribution of visitor demand to the seasonal sales variations experienced at grocery retailers in Cornwall, South West England. Design/methodology/approach -Working collaboratively with a major UK retailer provides access to store trading information and customer data from a popular loyalty card scheme. The authors use spatial analysis to identify revenue originating from outside the store catchment, and explore the spatial and temporal nature of the visitor demand recorded in-store. Findings -The paper demonstrates the significant degree of seasonality experienced around stores in terms of their revenue generated from out-of-catchment visitors, and highlights implications for store location planning. Most notably, visitor expenditure tends to demonstrate far more spatial and temporal clustering than residential demand. The authors argue that it is essential for retailers to ensure that their location planning makes full use of all available consumer data to understand the local nature of demand, including the impact of visitor expenditure.Research limitations/implications -The authors aim to use this insight to develop a spatial decision support system (SDSS) for use within site location planning in the retail sector. This would incorporate a spatial interaction model to estimate and account for variation in local demand generated by seasonal tourist visits. Originality/value -Customer level loyalty card data are rarely available for academic investigations and the authors are able to provide a unique insight into customer expenditure in tourist locations. There has been little exploration of seasonal tourist demand in store location planning, and this study addresses an identified academic and commercial need.

Assessing the Impact of Seasonal Population Fluctuation on Regional Flood Risk Management

“…It changes by season (i.e., larger in August compared to January) therefore visitor and residential visits to these sites does increase seasonally. The seasonal change in visitor to resident retail footfall is informed by previous work by Newing et al [22,35] analysing loyalty card data for stores within this region. The calculation of overnight visitors as a separate type of origin centroid dataset is described in the next section.…”

“…We make use of a novel dataset estimating the seasonal and spatial distribution of overnight visitors (Table 2). These estimates account for all visitors staying overnight within the study area (domestic and international tourists) and were built from the "bottom-up", taking individual accommodation "units" as the building block, aggregated to the unit postcode or census Output Area (OA) level to form visitor "origins", as outlined fully in Newing et al [35]. Accommodation units may represent commercial accommodation (e.g., a hotel room, self-catering cottage or camping pitch), or be drawn from the existing housing stock (holiday/second home, or home of a hosting friend or relative).…”

“…Coastal resorts exhibit spatial clusters of accommodation, visitor facilities and attractions and thus experience considerable seasonal uplift in local non-residential populations. Visitors support the provision of local services and infrastructure which may not be viable based solely on the basis of residential populations [33], but may also impact upon service delivery [34,35]. Coastal resorts within the study area, such as Par, Polkeris and Fowey, experience considerable seasonal fluctuations in population driven by an influx of domestic overnight visitors.…”

Visitor expenditure estimation for grocery store location planning: a case study of Cornwall

“…Nonetheless, Newing et al (2012;2014) demonstrated that visitor expenditure makes up a considerable proportion of sales within some grocery stores, yet grocery retailers have very limited knowledge of the drivers behind this form of expenditure. Location planning teams working within major grocery retailers have a long-established and important role in estimating revenue for proposed new stores and in managing the existing store portfolio by monitoring store performance against predicted revenue (Bennison et al, 1995; see also Wood and Reynolds (2011) for a detailed discussion of the role, scope and influence of location planning within a range of UK retailers ).…”

“…Cornwall is used as a study area as Newing et al (2012) demonstrated that at grocery stores in certain Cornish tourist resorts, visitor expenditure was found to represent over 50% of weekly store revenue during the peak tourist season, and it is inferred that this expenditure is driven by self-catering accommodation. Self-catering accommodation is known to generate visitor expenditure on food and drink as, by definition, meals are not provided as part of the accommodation.…”