Track government mandated closures of bars, retail, entertainment and more

PredictHQ users can now track government mandated closures of hospitality, retail and community facilities across every state in the US. The ability to reliably track these at scale ensures companies can update their strategies to mitigate losses or make the most of new opportunities.

This is an addition to our newly launched Health Warnings category to give our customers greater insight into the impact of health-related mandates You can now track the status of a range of venues with the following labels:

• Bars-closed/Bars-open

• Restaurant-closed/Restaurant-open

• Personal-care-closed/Personal-care-open ie hairdressers and barbers

• Recreation-closed/Recreation-open ie swimming pools and skate parks

• Retail-closed/Retail-open 

• Entertainment closed/Entertainment-open 

• House-of-worship-closed/House-of-worship-open 

This is a much requested feature from our transport and retail customers. Transport companies plan to use this information to ensure they have enough drivers or assets ready to meet demand when venues are open or re-open as well as quickly re-calibrate when they are closed. Similarly, retail customers need to know as early as possible insight into changes or forecast changes to either prepare directly to re-open, or to increase or decrease staff if they are situated in an area that relies on these venues to drive footfall. 

This is a feature within our API and Control Center. Here is an example of this new feature for the state of California for a government mandated closure from March 19 to June 11:

California was just one of several states with mandated recreation and outdoor venue closures. As these mandates are managed by each state, they were not uniform in their end dates.

The ability to track these kinds of closures across the USA easily and accurately without losing hours of team time googling and verifying enables our customers to invest more time in tailoring their strategies and preparing for the resumption of normal demand. 

In many cases, bar, restaurant and retail re-openings cause pent-up demand and unleash a surge in demand as venues re-open requires companies to move swiftly to prepare for re-opening or risk missing out on potential revenue, such as how McDonald’s and KFC did in New Zealand when their lockdown lifted and take-away food was purchasable again. These two chains received so much demand they rapidly ran out of key ingredients, missing out on thousands of orders.

To access this feature in Control Center: 

• Open up the search tab. 

• Enter the location you wish to search, and the period of interest into the date range.

• Under Labels, tick which venues you want to search such as restaurant-closed or recreation-closed. You can search multiple labels at once.

• Hit search and see your results.

How to receive instant alerts about new mandates

If you want to earliest possible insight into when government mandates are changing, you can set up an alert on our new Notifications platform. 

To do this you can create a new notification configuration for the labels you want to be notified about. Below is an example of this for the whole of the United States. To be notified for a specific state then just choose that state from the “Define location by place name” field.

Once this is set up you will be notified of any changes to events with these labels or if new events of this type are created. You can choose to receive a daily or weekly digest email or be notified immediately about these events. Talk to us to get access to notifications today.

How to track government mandated closures in the PredictHQ API 

As in Control Center, you call the API and filter on the appropriate label e.g. bar-closed or bar-open. Then specify the location (e.g. state) you want to see the lockdown events for.

The example below retrieves all bar-closed events that you have access to. Change the label to retrieve other types of events.

    curl -X GET https://api.predicthq.com/v1/events/?labels=bar-closed \ -H "Accept: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer $ACCESS_TOKEN"

  

If your company does not yet have access to PredictHQ's demand intelligence, get in touch with our team. We cover 18 categories of events across 30,000 cities.