Travel data leaders join forces as AirDNA acquires Arrivalist

Two of the travel industry’s leading sources of data and analysis regarding consumer behavior and market trends are teaming up.

AirDNA, a global authority on short-term rental data, has acquired Arrivalist, a location intelligence platform for marketers primarily at tourism boards as well as at hotels, attractions and other industry stakeholders in the United States.

Financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

Arrivalist will now become a product within AirDNA’s suite of solutions, and the 25-person Arrivalist team will join AirDNA. Arrivalist founder and CEO Cree Lawson becomes AirDNA’s futurist and head of destination advocacy.

In early 2022, private equity firm Alpine Investors acquired AirDNA for an undisclosed amount. The company now sits within Predictis – Alpine’s platform for data software businesses across multiple verticals.

AirDNA CEO Demi Horvat, who moved into that role last fall, said the company has been considering mergers and acquisitions to fuel growth since becoming part of Alpine’s portfolio.

And AirDNA was already working with Arrivalist as the provider of short-term rental data for its “Arrivalist Lodging” product, launched in 2021 to provide insights on hotels, vacations rentals and stays with friends and family – all patterns that were shifting during the pandemic. 

From there, as Lawson described it, alignment on shared values of data integrity and client-centricity, combined with the market opportunity, “pulled the two companies together.”

“This is no longer a one-stay-fits-all industry," Lawson said. "The total overnight economy has shifted, and we’re seeing vacation rentals that look like hotels, hotels that look like vacation rentals, hybrid models – the only remedy for this kind of complexity is sharper insights. And these two companies, combined, have a unique opportunity to answer the questions our clients will be asking 10 years from now.” 

Horvat said, from a product perspective, the combination of data sets – and data scientists – will provide valuable intelligence for clients, which is more critical than ever as historical data is less applicable.

“With COVID and all the changes that brought for this industry, I think it shined a light on just how important it is to understand the new patterns that have arisen and that are so different from the way things used to be,” she said.

“The blending of leisure and business travel, people rediscovering the outdoors and going to national parks more … the differences in international versus domestic tourism - all of those things are changes in patterns of movement that the Arrivalist data set can shine a light on.”

Cultural alignment

The two companies also share similar back-stories. Lawson founded Arrivalist in 2011, spurred by the realization that smartphones – which were suddenly in everyone’s pocket – made it possible to track the link between ad exposure and the user’s location.

The company never took in venture capital – as Lawson said, they have been “fortunate to be funded by happy customers over the last 12 years” – and now works with more than 200 travel marketers including 100 cities, 40 states and four of the top theme parks in the U.S.

In 2015, Scott Shatford founded AirDNA similarly because of emerging product – not smartphones but Airbnb. After developing a growing portfolio of rental properties, Shatford recognized the need for property managers to understand their competitive landscape to determine rates and maximize revenue. AirDNA now captures data on more than 10 million listings – from property managers, channel managers and individual hosts - in more than 120,000 markets around the world.

“It’s a very natural fit because both companies were industry pioneers and first movers in their space,” Horvat said.

“From a culture perspective, the companies were both primarily bootstrapped, scrappy, have that culture of innovation.”

Through the acquisition, the AirDNA and Arrivalist’s data platforms will combine into a unified dashboard solution, which they said will provide “a comprehensive view of the short-term rental market in any destination, enabling [destination management organizations] to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns with attribution tracking, gaining insights into the entire overnight economy … and differentiating between pass-through visitors and travelers specifically visiting their destination.”

And Lawson said the union of the two companies is also reflective of a larger trend.

“We’re watching the walls between different travel data sets collapse. It used to be enough to have one researcher with five logins to five data sets. Call that travel data 1.0.,” he said.

“This marks in my mind the beginning of travel data 2.0 - where you are integrating, not aggregating, data sets in one company to give clients more value out of a single login.”

According to Phocuswright manager of research and innovation Mike Coletta the acquisition is also an indication that short-term rentals are an essential sector that affects the overall travel industry.

“This is a sign of the maturing of the short-term rentals market as it becomes an integral part of the lodging landscape, but it has implications beyond the STR segment,” he said.

“DMOs, tour companies, attractions, activities and experiences, hotels and more can benefit from the granularity of behavioral insights that the combination of AirDNA and Arrivalist data will enable. Whether it’s marketing campaigns or influencing tourism dispersal strategies or simply improving the guest experience, there are a range of possibilities that this acquisition opens up. It should also be quite illuminating for the sector to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of events, attractions and media campaigns on STR stays.”