Moving from “That’s Awesome” to “Mission Critical”
We Are Just Getting Started.
Zartico, by definition, is not just a company but a movement. With our mission to provide the clearest view of the visitor economy, we set out three years ago to elevate the visitor economy for global communities. Today, we crossed the milestone of announcing our Series A as well as the launch of ZDOS® 3.0.
Before I dive in, let me first say, on behalf of all Zarticans, thank you to the tourism industry. We wake up each morning dedicated to making you the heroes in your destinations. The feedback you provide us on what you need fuels our roadmap, lines our notebooks of new ideas and pushes us forward.
Moving from “That’s Awesome” to “Mission Critical”
Investing in Product Enhancements
Zartico’s new financing will be used to deliver on a robust and ambitious product roadmap, starting with the launch of ZDOS® 3.0. As we look into the future, we dream about:
- Analytics Anywhere - intuitively provide users with the information they are looking for outside of a traditional BI environment. Today it’s an application log-in, in the future we’ll bring more and more of the application right where it is needed most.
- More Benchmarking, Indices and Key Metrics - tied to the Five Foundations of a Contemporary DMO.
- Additional Proprietary Datasets - we will continue to seek out the most meaningful data to help you tell destination stories.
- Predictive Forecasting - AI and ML capabilities will give us better tools to steward visitor distribution and predict and avoid over-tourism.
- Improved User Interface - we’re doubling down on the work needed to elevate the user experience to deliver a ZDOS®️ that’s better equipped to give the views and insights into the visitor economy.
- Product Education - we are tripling our educational team to build out programs and certification courses for all members of destination organizations.
Zartico’s #1 Priority is to Service Our Existing Partners
Investing in People, People, People
Zartico’s number one focus is to service our existing partners. Within the next six months, Zartico plans to add over fifty people in engineering, product, advisory and data science. As a work-from-anywhere organization, we invest heavily in building culture through our core values and diverse workforce.
The pandemic heightened the world’s understanding and appreciation of a Destination Organization’s impact on visitor and resident quality of life. We now have a captive audience for our efforts, are we going to tell the same story? According to US Travel, despite gains through the summer, leisure and hospitality still represents 34% of all job losses and remains 8% below its pre-pandemic levels as of November. We have to attract talent from outside the industry. We debated extensively as to whether or not we wanted to make our funding public but in the end, we decided the goal of recruiting talent to our beloved industry pushed us to focus on creating some hype.
Our Commitment to the Industry:
- We will continue to listen and learn. Keep telling us what you need. The more you communicate with us the better. And not just emails and texts, we will pick up the phone when you call. Let’s have meaningful conversations.
- We will continue to tackle hard things. We are creating a technology that has never existed before. Our Place-Based Strategy and the Integrated Data Model™ exist nowhere else. To accomplish our mission, we will keep building.
- We will continue to invest in reliability, service and product enhancements. Each Zartican has this singular mission – supporting your role in creating community shared values with your stakeholders – and it fuels how we think about product, service, education and thought leadership.
Our mission provides the north star to endure the highs and lows of doing something that has never been done before. Don't get me wrong, this is really hard, but for me, being part of something bigger than myself and feeling connected to the cause… and ultimately, believing we can change the world for the better keeps me going.
Because after all, those who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who usually do.
