Springboard registers continued fall in pedestrian traffic
The effect of half term upon footfall last week has been diffused by the spread of the school holiday across all weeks of February, and as a result, numbers have dropped against last year by -4.7%, a drop on the -0.6% of last year. This is likely to influence the weekly results for the remainder of February, with the monthly results giving the opportunity for a broader understanding of whether the school holiday has benefitted these locations. On a positive note however, footfall rose from the previous week, by +6.9%, slightly below the +10.9% of 2018 but an improvement on the growth of +2.0% of last week.
The growth in shopper volumes against the previous week permeated across all regions and location types. This was most prevalent in high street locations with an overall increase of +8.8% but closely followed by shopping centres and high streets rising +5.1% and +4.8% apiece.
Annually however, shopping centres saw the greatest impact of the movement of the holidays declining -7.3% against last year, with only Scotland avoiding the negativity with an increase of +0.02%. High streets and retail parks were also affected, with high street numbers falling annually by -4.9% and Retail Parks by -1.5%. Regionally, only Wales subverted the annual decline with an overall increase of +0.5% across all location types.
