Calculating Catchment Areas with Human Mobility Data

Calculating catchment areas using human mobility data is essential for businesses, especially in sectors like Retail and Real Estate. Traditional methods such as circular trade areas or isochrones can be unreliable due to various factors like population density and travel patterns. The use of human mobility data from Vodafone Analytics provides a more accurate and flexible approach to calculate catchment areas. This method uses the origins of visitors aggregated at different levels (cell, municipality, province) and takes into account variables like type of activity, day of the week, time of day, and sociodemographic characteristics. The results show that traditional approaches fail to capture where people visiting a specific location actually come from, while human mobility data allows for building targeted catchment areas in different scenarios, such as weekdays and weekends, or by customer profile. This method can provide valuable insights for businesses, enabling them to make informed decisions on staffing, location management, inventory, and more.