Tourism is one of the last “big industries” to become empowered with big data. That can be easily explained. Despite being one of the largest industries (10.3 of the world GDP in the pre-pandemic 2019), tourism includes so many actors that aren’t big enough to go alone into big data.
The pandemic has hit tourism sharply, but destinations still rely on quarter and annual reports, making decisions on product mix, strategy, and marketing based on, usually, outdated data.
But as I said, the caleidoscope of destinations, attractions, and hoteliers was too broad, and each was too small to develop digital solutions to make decisions based on big data. Usually, in such industries, there is a third-party solution that’s offered to a lot of industry actors. Therefore, such a platform achieves necessary economies of scale.
Zartico is a platform that uses big data to inject them into tourism operations. It works, in simple words, as Zartico provides analytics and visualizations to destination management organizations, and government-affiliated offices that promote locations to tourists.
And on September 20, 2022, Zartico announced that it raised $20 million in Series A funding. Arthur Ventures led the round that also included Peterson Partners.
How does Zartico work
The Zartico platform combines the data from partners, including geolocation, events, and spending, with other data for a particular location. In this way, Zartico consumers can see an analysis of people’s behavior at a destination and analyze their impact on local businesses.
The company then uses AI to predict activity metrics such as the number of visitors to a particular area. Separately, the extraction of mentions of destinations from social media posts (i.e., analysis of unstructured text) deserves special attention. All this, obviously, allows us to get a better picture of visitors and improve marketing quality.
Zartico was created in March 2020, just a couple of days before the pandemic hit tourism sharply, but still now has 188 consumers, all are government offices.
Today company plans not only to develop the current business model but also to expand into machine learning to study people’s behavior. The company is also looking into other areas, like sports venues and airports.
Since 2020, Zartico has raised $24.5 million in investments, including this Series A $20 million. According to the company, in 2021, it made $10 million in annual revenue.
