Newquay has been declared the best performing Business Improvement District (BID) town in a footfall-driven indices report for July 2022.
The research organisation Place Informatics has given Newquay this title because it is the only BID town out of 260 to have equalled its pre-pandemic 2019 footfall level in July 2022.
This achievement is no small feat, as the pandemic has evidently caused a decrease in people being more willing to travel into busy town centres to shop or eat and drink. However, the wide-ranging appeal of Newquay as a holiday destination, a day-tripper location and a resident shopping centre, coupled with the hot weather during the summer meant that Newquay was the perfect place for many people to spend their days.
Place Informatics generated this data through calculating the footfall figures of over 2,300 town centres through extrapolated data of the phone usage of over 12 million phones. Newquay’s high re-growth goes against the general trend of footfall in 2022 which is much lower than the 2019 level in almost all BID towns, regardless of their size or location in the country. Furthermore, the majority have witnessed an unfortunate decrease in their rate of footfall growth compared to the 2019 level, whereas Newquay had an increase from June 2022 to July 2022 of +26%.
Newquay BID manager, Mark Warren, said: “I’m really glad to see that all the effort that Newquay BID businesses have put into ensuring that the town has been able deal with the increased footfall this summer.
“It really is a testament to the hard work of the local businesses that we are the only BID town to reach our 2019 levels, and we should be proud. With the extra hot summer and scorching Boardmasters weekend, Newquay was quite clearly one of the most popular places to be this year yet again. We hope that this positive achievement can help to increase further benefits for the businesses going forward.”
