Zartico vs. Arrivalist: Which Destination Intelligence Platform Is Right for Your DMO?

Destination marketing organizations have better tools than ever to understand traveler behavior, measure campaign performance, and make the case for tourism's economic impact to boards and stakeholders.

Two names come up consistently in this space: Zartico and Arrivalist. Both offer data-driven insights for destination marketers, but they come from different angles and serve different use cases.

This guide breaks down what each platform does, where they excel, where they fall short, and how to figure out which one fits your destination.

What Is Zartico?

Zartico is a SaaS destination intelligence company founded in 2019 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It operates the Destination Operating System (ZDOS®), a platform designed to give DMOs a unified view of visitor behavior across geolocation, lodging, and spending data.

Zartico's core value proposition is integration. Its proprietary Integrated Data Model fuses geolocation signals, hotel and short-term rental performance data (via a partnership with Key Data), transaction-level spend data, and event data into one picture. The platform uses machine learning to surface patterns and translate raw data into recommendations without requiring a dedicated data team on the DMO side.

In August 2025, Zartico launched its LI Spatial Archive (Location Intelligence Spatial Archive), billed as the tourism industry's first end-to-end view of the physical-world consumer journey, spanning inspiration, ad exposure, arrival, movement, and spending in near real-time.

Key products in the Zartico suite include:

• Z5: the next-generation dashboard that replaced ZDOS®, featuring the Quality Visitor Index (QVI), destination lift tracking, Local Lens, and Executive Pulse for stakeholder reporting
• Zartico Media Attribution: a footfall attribution solution that connects media spend to actual visitation, measuring visitor intelligence metrics, performance metrics, and economic impact
• Zartico Visitor Journey App: a movement visualization tool showing where visitors go before and after key events or locations

Zartico is used by over 400 DMOs across North America.

What Is Arrivalist?

Arrivalist was founded in 2012 in New York City and is one of the longer-tenured players in destination analytics. It was originally built around one question: did your advertising actually cause people to travel? The platform pioneered location change attribution for tourism marketers.

In 2023, Arrivalist was acquired by AirDNA, a leading short-term rental data company. Both now sit within Predictis, a family of data businesses under Alpine Investors. The acquisition accelerated Arrivalist's product roadmap, resulting in the 2024 launch of Tourism Insights, a unified dashboard combining Arrivalist's visitation intelligence with AirDNA's short-term rental data.

Arrivalist's methodology is built around its proprietary Trip Methodology, a normalized, panel-based approach to mobile location data that delivers stability and reliability across changing device landscapes, including cookieless attribution for CTV and other privacy-first channels.

Key products include:

• Trip Insights: origin market data, length of stay, seasonality analysis, and fly vs. drive mix
• Campaign Attribution: measuring whether advertising exposures drove actual visits, with control group methodology
• Tourism Insights Dashboard: a consolidated view of visitation intelligence plus short-term rental and hotel data via AirDNA
• Spend Intelligence: described as the tourism industry's highest-fidelity credit card spend platform

Arrivalist counts more than 200 travel marketers among its clients, including roughly 100 cities, 40 U.S. states, and several major theme parks.

Zartico vs. Arrivalist: Head-to-Head Comparison

Data Methodology

Both platforms are built on mobile location data, but their approaches differ.

Zartico's LI Spatial Archive is built around census-level, full-coverage movement data, aiming to capture all device-level signals rather than panel-based sampling. The platform processes raw observational data through machine learning to remove noise and bias before surfacing insights.

Arrivalist uses a panel-based methodology with a normalized dataset going back to 2015. That long track record is a real advantage for DMOs that want to benchmark performance over many years. Arrivalist also emphasizes cookieless measurement, which matters as third-party cookies become less reliable.

Edge: Zartico for raw data volume and real-time census-level coverage. Arrivalist for historical depth and panel stability.

Campaign Attribution

Attribution is Arrivalist's home turf. The company was built to answer a question DMOs have long struggled with: did my advertising actually drive visitation? Its model compares exposed audiences against control groups to isolate incremental visits driven by specific media campaigns.

Zartico offers Media Attribution as well, connecting media spend to footfall and economic outcomes. Its 2025 product evolution added economic impact metrics to the attribution picture, so DMOs can tie campaign performance not just to visits but to downstream spend.

Edge: Arrivalist for attribution methodology maturity. Zartico for connecting attribution to economic impact.

Lodging and Short-Term Rental Data

The AirDNA acquisition gave Arrivalist a meaningful advantage here. Tourism Insights integrates AirDNA's short-term rental data covering Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com directly alongside visitation intelligence. DMOs get ADR, revenue, future pacing, and rental performance by origin market in one view.

Zartico partners with Key Data for lodging data, which it describes as the world's largest commercially available lodging dataset, covering more than half the national lodging market across hotels and short-term rentals. This feeds into the Integrated Data Model alongside geolocation and spend.

Edge: Roughly a draw. Arrivalist's integration feels more native given the direct AirDNA relationship. Zartico's Key Data partnership offers comparable depth.

Spend Intelligence

Zartico integrates transaction-level spending data into its platform, letting destinations understand not just who is visiting but how much those visitors are spending and where. The Quality Visitor Index (QVI) helps DMOs identify their most economically impactful visitor segments.

Arrivalist has its own spend platform, described as the tourism industry's highest-fidelity credit card spend solution.

Edge: Zartico for integrating spend with movement and lodging data in one model.

Ease of Use

Zartico markets itself as a platform that requires no data team. Insights are surfaced directly rather than requiring users to interpret raw charts. Z5 includes saved views and report configurations that simplify recurring reporting workflows.

Arrivalist's Tourism Insights dashboard is designed to be visual and easy to use, with date customization, interactive filters, and automatic report scheduling. It offers self-service access around the clock.

Both platforms are built to be accessible to destination marketers without a technical background, which matters given the staffing realities of most DMOs.

Edge: Comparable. Zartico's machine learning-surfaced insights may reduce the interpretation burden for smaller teams.

Competitive Benchmarking

Zartico lets destinations benchmark against competitor destinations, covering relative visitor volume, spending, and origin market overlap as a standard capability in Z5.

Arrivalist offers competitive share data as part of its travel analytics suite, helping destinations understand where they stand relative to rival markets.

Edge: Comparable. Zartico's visualization of competitive movement data tends to be more intuitive.

Stakeholder Reporting

Both platforms serve an important secondary audience: boards, elected officials, and community partners who need to understand tourism's economic impact without wading through data.

Zartico's Executive Pulse feature is built specifically for this, producing clean summaries for non-technical stakeholders. Multiple DMO clients specifically cite Zartico's value in board presentations.

Arrivalist's automatic report scheduling lets teams deliver data to stakeholders on a set cadence without manual effort.

Edge: Zartico for purpose-built stakeholder communication tools.

Pricing

Neither platform publishes pricing publicly. Zartico serves 400+ destinations; Arrivalist serves 200+. Zartico's larger install base suggests strong product investment. Arrivalist's backing from Alpine Investors through the AirDNA acquisition gives it significant resources as well.

Arrivalist has been made available through state-level grant programs. Virginia Tourism Corporation, for example, offered zero-cost access to qualifying DMOs through 2025, which suggests it may be more accessible for smaller destinations with tighter budgets.

Edge: Arrivalist for accessibility at smaller DMO budget levels. Zartico for destinations investing more heavily in data infrastructure.

Who Should Choose Zartico?

Zartico is the stronger fit for DMOs that:

• Want a fully integrated view of geolocation, spending, and lodging in a single data model
• Need to demonstrate economic impact to stakeholders, not just visitation numbers
• Want machine learning-surfaced insights without needing an internal data analyst
• Need real-time, census-level movement data
• Are managing destination growth or need-period fill as strategic priorities alongside marketing

Who Should Choose Arrivalist?

Arrivalist is the stronger fit for DMOs that:

• Have media attribution at the center of their analytics needs and want a proven, long-standing methodology
• Need historical data going back to 2015 for multi-year benchmarking
• Are already invested in short-term rental performance data via AirDNA
• Want cookieless attribution for CTV and emerging media channels
• Are a smaller or state-funded DMO looking for accessible pricing

The Missing Piece: AI Search Visibility

Both Zartico and Arrivalist measure what happens after a visitor arrives. Neither addresses a growing question for destination marketers: is your destination showing up when travelers ask AI where to go?

Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are increasingly the first stop for trip planning. The destinations that appear prominently in those answers are capturing visitors before they ever click a link. Traditional visitor intelligence tools do not measure this at all.

This is the gap that NextTown AI is built to address, monitoring and improving how AI systems represent your destination, tracking sentiment alongside visibility, and executing the content strategy needed to make your destination the one AI recommends.

Forward-looking DMOs are beginning to pair traditional visitor intelligence (Zartico or Arrivalist) with AI search optimization tools, treating AI discoverability as its own marketing channel.

Bottom Line

Zartico and Arrivalist are both solid platforms built for destination marketers. The right choice depends on your priorities.

Choose Zartico if economic impact storytelling, integrated data, and real-time precision are what matter most. Choose Arrivalist if campaign attribution depth, historical benchmarking, and short-term rental data are at the top of your list.

Either way, neither platform tells you whether your destination is visible when travelers ask AI where to visit. That is a question worth answering before your competitors do.

NextTown AI helps destination marketers monitor and improve their visibility across AI search platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Get a free AI visibility snapshot for your destination.

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