In case you missed it, GRCVB recently released ETA Wake County, a visitor arrival data report for Q4 of calendar year 2025. This report is made possible through the CVB's paid partnership with Arrivalist, a geo-location and ad measurement intelligence tool for destinations, which supplements the survey research and business intelligence otherwise gathered from visitors and from the Bureau's other vendors each year.

Arrivalist-powered destination dashboards, as provided below, paint a fuller picture of visitation trends for Wake County, points of interest (POIs) and areas inside the county in near real-time and include our best estimate of all U.S. adult trips (not just overnight stays in our area hotels) taken more than 50 miles from one's home for reasons other than commuting.

Our Q4 report, available here (or by clicking the image below), also contains hotel-specific intelligence within a Lodging Economics Dashboard (LED, see last page). The LED's estimates again paint a fuller picture of countywide overnight visitation trends than has been viewable up to now through STR's destination data currently reported in the GRCVB's weekly Tourism Talk E-newsletter.

Insights and Applications for this Quarter:

• Around 43% of Q4 2025 visitors were day-trippers to Wake County, who did not stay overnight in the destination at paid accommodations or private homes.
• The top origin market for Q4 2025 visitors to Wake County was the Raleigh/Durham/Fayetteville Designated Market Area (DMA, a 23-county region), and 55.8% of all visitors hail from North Carolina. Other notable origin states for Q4 include D.C. and Va., Fla., S.C., N.Y. and Ga. These origin insights can help our business partners with ad and promotional targeting.
• Out of 700 POIs tracked in Wake County, RDU International Airport saw the most visitor volume in Q4 2025, followed by Crabtree, Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek, North Hills – Main District and Lenovo Center, respectively. Of the top 25 POIs by visitor volume, RDU International Airport drew the highest proportion of visitors (52%) vs. residents of Wake County (48%) in Q4 2025.
• Insights for accommodation partners from Q4 2025: overnight visitors from the New York, Charlotte, Greenville/New Bern/Washington, Atlanta and Wilmington DMAs spent the most with Wake County hotels across all hotel classes. Q4’s average hotel revenue per arrival was $266. (Revenues tracked by the LED vs. STR's accounting suggest capture of approximately 28% of hotel stays with these data.)

GRCVB's ETA Wake County E-newsletter is released quarterly, and Wake County partners can sign up for this newsletter, here. (Annual insights derived from Arrivalist data also are released as a Wake County Visitation Data Supplement alongside GRCVB's Annual Report in August.)