The Placer.ai dashboard provides multiple tools to help you determine the best retail or concession operators for your airport. Use True Trade Areas, Visitor Journeys, and Void Analysis to discover unmet demand, visitors’ favorite chains, and the best-fit retailer based on a series of insights including demographics, co-tenancy, visits, and cannibalization.

You’ll be able to answer these questions after reading this article:

1. What retailers do well with the tenants already in place?
2. Who is the best-fit retailer for your location?
3. How can you best understand your customers’ preferences?

Get started with the following steps:

‍Step 1: Run a Placer.ai Void Analysis on your airport to see which chains are the best fit

a. From the Property report, open the Void Analysis^{A tool that generates a list of the most promising potential tenants for any property based on a variety of factors, such as demographic match, cannibalization, frequent co-tenants, and more.} page from the left sidebar. This will launch a new tab in the Advanced Reports section. By adjusting the left-side filters, you can control relevant factors such as store size, tenant categories, tenant expansion rate, and more. While this list provides specific chains and their relative fit score, you can also review the list for trends - i.e. are many of the top matches restaurants or apparel retailers?

Learn about Void Analysis

b. Choose a retailer from the list, and click Match Analysis to open the detail page.

c. Here you have a full view of the match between your chosen location and this retailer in terms of demographics, cannibalization^{Cannibalization occurs when revenues at a brand’s store location drop as a result of opening an additional store nearby.} of existing stores, and frequent co-tenants.

Pro Tip: you can also run Void Analysis on empty land or a random address. Navigate to Advanced Reports in the top navigation bar, click on Void Analysis in the left sidebar, click on Add New Report, and either enter a street address or select Drop Pin on a specific location.

Step 2: Review your visitors’ favorite chains and places 

The preferences of your current passengers can provide powerful insights into which businesses would thrive within your terminals.

a. In the Property reports, navigate to the Visitor Journey^{The flow of commercial activity to and from any property that shows the top "Prior" and "Post" locations.} section in the left sidebar. Scroll down to Favorite Chains. This allows you to see which chains your visitors have frequented the most during your report’s time period. For example, below you see that the #1 apparel retailer visited at least 3 times in the year by Madison Yards visitors is Ross Dress for Less.

Learn about Visitor Journey

b. Scroll down one more section to Favorite Places. This is similar to Favorite Chains but it’s further broken down into the individual location level. You can see that the #1 restaurant visited at least 3 times is the Chick-Fil-A around the corner, but the #2 is another Chick-Fil-A in the area. 

Pro Tip: a number of other datasets available in the Placer platform such as Mosaic Psychographics, Spatial.ai Proximity, and AGS Behavior & Attitudes can provide additional visitor preference details.