The launch of the summer driving season will garner considerable interest in the oil market this week, a group of market-watchers recently told Rigzone.
An initial assessment of Americans’ Memorial Day Weekend travel activity shows a sharp rebound in road trip activity as well as changing travel patterns in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns, the travel industry-focused marketing and advertising firm Arrivalist reported Tuesday. Tracking the global positioning system movements of mobile devices, Arrivalist concluded that U.S. travel increased 48.5 percent on May 22 to 23 compared to the previous weekend (May 15 to 16).
“The holiday weekend was the most dramatic increase in weekend-over-weekend road trips in 2020, bringing road trip activity within sight of 2019 holiday travel levels,” Arrivalist observed in a written statement emailed to Rigzone.
Against other holiday weekends within the past 12 months, Arrivalist found the Memorial Day Weekend 2020 road trip figures correspond to 68.2 percent of Martin Luther King Day weekend 2020 levels and 56.1 percent of Labor Day 2019 levels.
“We’re seeing a volume of road trip activity we haven’t seen since early before the COVID-19 Pandemic,” remarked Cree Lawson, Arrivalist’s founder and CEO. “Travel patterns varied widely from place to place but the level of activity is reminiscent of previous spring break levels.”
Not only more Americans taking road trips, but they are also traveling longer distances, noted Matt Clement, Arrivalist’s vice president of marketing.
“The majority of road trips measured since COVID-19 began impacting travel in mid-March were 50 to 100 miles, with some of 100 to 250 miles,” he explained. “But over Memorial Day weekend trips of 250-plus miles reached a level not seen since the spring break season in late February and early March.”
Arrivalist also detected differences in the places Americans visited over the holiday weekend. For instance, the firm pointed out that some remote destinations and areas saw significant increases in year-over-year activity while others saw little to no activity. In the West, remote attractions such as Mount Rushmore, Lake Tahoe, Lake Powell and Grand Tetons National Park returned to 80 to 100 percent of their 2019 activity levels, the company explained. Other popular attractions – such as Yosemite National Park in the West and Colonial Williamsburg and Washington, D.C. in the East – welcomed fewer visitors year-over-year, it added.
According to Arrivalist, the number of road trips to beaches varied markedly by region. For instance, the company tracked the most dramatic jump in beach visitation at South Padre Island, Texas, but reported virtually no visitors to beach areas closed to the public such as Santa Monica and Venice Beach in California. Along the East Coast, the most popular beach destinations included Myrtle Beach, S.C., the Jersey Shore and Daytona Beach, Fla. Arrivalist noted that visits to those areas hit at least 80 percent of 2019 levels.
The Memorial Day Weekend data also revealed that weekend-over-weekend travel activity increased the most in Oregon, where the number of trips grew 82.9 percent during the period. Other Top 5 states in terms of weekend-over-weekend changes in activity include:
- Missouri (79.7 percent)
- Kansas (79.7 percent)
- Arkansas (74.3 percent)
- Texas (73.7 percent).
With a change of just 5.6 percent weekend-over-weekend, Delaware posted the smallest gain in travel activity. Arrivalist noted that other states with the lowest growth rates included New Jersey (7.2 percent), North Dakota (21.9 percent), Connecticut (23.4 percent) and Maryland (25.3 percent).
To contact the author, email mveazey@rigzone.com.
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