These 10 U.S. Zip Codes Buy the Most Travel Online

It probably won't surprise you to learn that some of the ritziest areas of the United States are big buyers of travel online. But many of us are curious about which neighborhoods, specifically, buy the most travel.

So Skift asked Adara, the Palo Alto-based travel data aggregator, to pinpoint the U.S. zip codes that buy the most travel online.

In an exclusive survey, the company examined purchases made between October 2017, and April 2018 that resulted in travel domestically and internationally. It examined all flight and hotel bookings — not searches, only actual transactions — made on desktop computers and mobile devices for travel done with its more than 190 data partners.

Major brands, such as American Airlines, United, Marriott, and Hyatt, give data — without including personally identifiable information — to the company in exchange for broader insights about the patterns in how hundreds of millions of people research and buy travel online.

Some caveats: The following data show where people buy their travel, meaning where they are at the time they make their purchase — not their destination. Many people purchase travel while at work, though they're commuting from elsewhere, which confuses geographic attribution.

Related to that: Some bookings are inferred to be within a five-mile radius of a zip code when other details are absent, though there's no double-counting. For example, a few of the zip codes in this list are primarily Postal Office mailing facilities.

In short, these lists reveal robust patterns at the city-level, but they are less-than-scientifically-precise about neighborhoods.

The Top 10 Zip Codes for Booking Hotels, October 2017 to April 2018, Ranked

The Top 10 Zip Codes for Booking Flights, October 2017 to April 2018, Ranked

Source: Adara

To no one’s surprise, districts in California and major cities with dense populations feature prominently in the top-travel-buying U.S. zip codes.

But the survey revealed some distinct neighborhood patterns. The truly most exclusive American neighborhoods aren't the biggest spenders on travel overall.

Take a back seat, Miami's Fisher Island, with the zip code of 33109. That is the wealthiest zip code, according to a Bloomberg analysis of 2015 Internal Revenue Service data.

Surprisingly, it's not tops in the travel buying list.

To be sure, most of the top travel buying zip codes overlap with some of the most expensive districts in the nation. The presence of a handful of exclusive Silicon Valley neighborhoods underlines the point.

Yet less expensive places like Indianapolis, Indiana, also appear on the top-10 list. The 46227 zip code has a median home value of $93 per square foot, according to real estate database Zillow. That's significantly less than the $1,113 per square foot median in Mountain View, California.

So how much travel are these zip codes buying? Adara said that it's too difficult to quantify the amount spent by these districts.

“Last year, luxury travelers spent an estimated $67.5 billion on vacations,” notes Steve Cohen, vice president of research and insights at MMGY Global. The research and marketing firm’s recent survey identified luxury travelers as the 11 percent of American travelers who have an average annual income of $224,000.

Chicago Is Tops

Is the data for the six months a fluke? Skift asked the company to run the numbers for prior six-month periods, and the results were broadly consistent — with a few variations.

Chicago's 60602 is the zip code that popped up the most often as being a top buyer of travel in rolling six-month periods since early 2016.

Look at this data from the first-half of 2016.

And here's data from the first-half of 2017.

Some zip codes bounce up and down the rankings, such as why Atlanta tops some time and then Chicago other times. Seasonality did not seem to be much of a factor. Look at these second-half 2017 rankings and they're broadly consistent.

Scrupulousness with data is one reason why the 200-employee Adara has raised $68 million in venture capital and probably why it has earned the trust of many brands to manage a shared industry pool of data.