Valentines Day Mall Visit Spree
Mall visits (footfall) are highly correlated with sales in retail stores. Valentines day is a special day for many Filipinos and malls are the usual go to place to celebrate. Malls then compete to capture the surge in the Valentines day mall visits. We want to see the effect of Valentines day to mall visit counts in February 2025.
Inquiro has the insights on demand.
We looked at various malls around Metro Manila and a sample daily footfall count from Feb 1 to Feb 28.
Daily Visit Counts
We can see that February 14 2025 saw the most mall visitors in Metro Manila. The day landed on a Friday, where some employees are already receiving their salaries – boosting capacity to spend. Different malls compete to capture visits. Some malls hosted Valentines related events, some offered shopping sales especially for gifts, and most added decorations to reinforce the ‘love season’ to potential customers. Every mall tries to capitalize on the Valentines day mall visit spree.
Mall Visit Comparisons
Comparing mall visits reveals that SM Megamall captured the most footfall – with +91% increase from average daily counts in February. SM Megamall has consistently been one of the most visited malls in the Philippines. It is strategically positioned along EDSA, with a mature transit terminal, surrounded by office buildings, condominiums populated by customers with relatively high capacity for retail spending. Its proximity with other premier malls like Shangri-la and the Podium, actually adds to its footfall affinity. The theory of gravity models revealed that the size of retail shops attracts more customers as they see it as more options and more reason to visit. Multiple retail shops extends this idea and therefore multiple malls surrounding each other acts as multiplier for visits.
Mall visitors during Valentines day. Bigger circle means more visitors, redness.blueness of circle highlights the magnitude of change from average daily counts. Redder reflects big increase from mean, blue means decrease from daily mean.
Diving in, we can see that all the malls saw significant increase in mall visits, with half of them gaining more than double their average daily count in February. A testament to the influence of a single day to mall visits.
The biggest gainer was Choice Market Ortigas and Ayala Malls Vertis North. We do not have enough info on how and why they gained so much foot traffic but the data does point to them.
The least gainer was Ayala Malls Marikina and 999 Shopping Mall in Binondo.
Take aways
Valentines is one of the busiest day in terms of mall visits. Malls do their best to capture this event – putting up Valentines decorations, sales announcement, store discounts for couples etc. Inquiro can empower retail stores to help them track footfall visits, compare with competition, and capture trends.
If you are interested in our solution, request a demo with us! info@inquiro.ph
