Transcript:
Jay Kinghorn: [00:00:00] What we see is those benchmarks, that accountability. It has a lot of opportunity for the DMO to really show what they do more clearly and transparently, particularly all of the great benefits that their hard work does of benefiting the communities they live in.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:20] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker. Really excited to have you all with me listening today. We've got a great guest. His name is Jay Kinghorn, and he is one of the founders of Zartico and overseas, Jay, correct me if I'm wrong, oversees all the product creation and evolution and development at Zartico.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:00:41] Yes, indeed. It's a pleasure to be with you, Adam.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:43] Yeah, excited to have you. What's that official title? Is it chief technical officer?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:00:48] Chief innovation officer and co-founder.
Adam Stoker: [00:00:50] Chief innovation officer. Okay. That's what I get for trying to remember and not reading it. Well, this has been a long time coming, Jay. I think the first time I reached out to you was back when you were not even in the private sector. You were at the State of Utah Office of Tourism. A lot has happened since then, hasn't it?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:01:09] Oh, my goodness, a lot has happened in a few short years.
Adam Stoker: [00:01:12] Yeah, exactly. It's been fun to watch the growth of your company. We'll talk about you and your organization a little bit. But before we get too far into it, I've got a couple of questions I like to ask everybody that comes on the show. My first question, Jay, is what is your dream destination? If you could go anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:01:29] That's a challenging one. When everyone was locked at home during COVID, I liked to dream. I would just look up random countries on Instagram. A place I kept gravitating to over and over again was to see the Northern Lights in Sweden or Finland, one of the Scandinavian countries, because the mountains, especially in Norway, the fjords, are so beautiful. That's probably at the top of the list. But that's a very long list.
Adam Stoker: [00:01:55] Yeah. Well, in this industry, it seems like every day you add another item to your bucket list because there are so many amazing destinations out there. But I think that's a good answer. I actually spoke today with my friend Cody from Travel Manitoba. He said that they actually have a great area within their destination where you can see the Northern Lights. Maybe you don't have to go as far as you think to see those Northern Lights.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:02:19] Yeah. Absolutely. There are remarkable places around every turn.
Adam Stoker: [00:02:22] Absolutely. Well, that's a great dream destination. You talk about Scandinavia. I'm sure that it's more than just the Northern Lights. You talked about the scenic views, the fjords, and everything else that they have there. If you had to narrow it down to a country in Scandinavia, which one would you say?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:02:38] I think probably Norway. I would hone in on that one.
Adam Stoker: [00:02:42] Norway? Norway is an interesting place. I have a friend that actually spent a couple of years in Norway. Just goes on and on about how amazing that country is.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:02:52] It seems like a dream.
Adam Stoker: [00:02:53] Awesome. Is this a trip that's happening sometime soon, or is it still just in the dream phase? Where are you at in the marketing funnel for visiting Norway?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:03:02] Well, it's still definitely in the dream phase. We've got some other trips that are a little bit more concrete in the agenda, in the calendar. But it's always nice to have just these beautiful places around the world that one can drop into. It's a remarkable world we live in.
Adam Stoker: [00:03:16] Great. Well, let's talk about places you have been. Speaking of the remarkable world that we live in, tell me maybe one of your favorite travel memories or your favorite travel experience that you've had.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:03:30] After college, I never traveled overseas. I took a trip with a friend, and we traveled through Southeast Asia for four and a half months. We spent a month in Cambodia, a month in Laos, and two and a half months in Thailand. I would say on that trip that Cambodia has some really exceptional memories traveling through the southern part of the country. It was only recently safe after the Khmer Rouge. We took a train ride from Sihanoukville and the southern Gulf of Andaman, or Andaman Sea to another town called Kep.
Then from there, took a little taxi to Kampot. It was this quaint little village that was part of French Indochina. It was in this transition zone. We ended up staying with the director of social affairs with Province. What was most remarkable was getting to teach English for the kids in an orphanage and getting to follow him on a day-to-go experience what it was like to live in rural Cambodia at that time and as someone that grew up in the suburbs of the United States, to see these folks who had to go 6 kilometers every day to get fresh water, it was really transformative. It highlighted for me just how much I had to learn about the world around me.
Adam Stoker: [00:04:39] Wow. That's amazing. Southeast Asia, what made you decide that we're going to go to those three countries on this amazing four-and-a-half-month trip?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:04:50] It was part of my friend's dream to go there. In college, I studied religious studies with an emphasis in Eastern religions. To be able to learn about Buddhism in theory and then to go see it in practice was a really special thing.
Adam Stoker: [00:05:04] Oh, that's fascinating. It's funny because you studied religion, which I would imagine that made you have access to several religions over the course of your studies to observe each individual one and actually see it in person. That's got to be such a unique experience because there's similarities between so many religions, but also so many unique differences. I don't know, that sounds really fascinating to me.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:05:32] Yeah, it was. I've had a really nonlinear career path. Religious studies, I think, kind of kicked that off because it gets you to think about the world from a different paradigm than your own, see the world through fresh eyes, through different experiences. Then being there in those Buddhist countries in Southeast Asia, you would see both the spiritual aspects as well as the pragmatic and practical just day-to-day living of how life was in those communities. Coming back to Cambodia, seeing these people who really had very few material possessions, but yet they possess this deep dignity and humanity, and humility about them was something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
Adam Stoker: [00:06:16] Awesome. I've got a little brother who actually visits- I say little brother. He's 6"4, 250 pounds, and has all the jeans we wish we got, but my little brother went to Thailand and spent a couple of weeks there and actually got bit by a monkey. The thing that they told him when he went there was, "If there's anything you do, don't get bit by a monkey. You got to be careful of that." Sure enough, tries to hold a monkey and the thing bites him. I don't know. The way he talked about Thailand, he had some really unique experiences there. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share. It doesn't have to just be Thailand, but from this four-and-a-half-month trip, any of the unique experiences that you encountered or maybe cultural differences you encountered while you were there.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:06:58] I got attacked by a peacock in Cambodia. I didn't get bitten by a monkey, but I got attacked by a peacock. But one story that comes to mind was whenever you travel, you're always subject to things going wrong; flights being canceled, luggage being lost. Like this stuff just happens and heights, it becomes a great part of your experience in travel. One day, we've been trying to get on a ferry to go to those one set of islands that we've been trying to go to in Thailand, and it didn't work out. We had to go to plan B, and we had to go to plan C. Since it was after college, we were traveling with big backpacks. We traveled in these three-wheel vehicles called tuk-tuks. They're a motorcycle with a carriage in the back. Thailand, the traffic is always really bad, whatever city we went to. Pulled up and we got out. I noticed, look to the right, look to the left. There was no traffic. I made a break for it, running across the street with this giant backpack, and I'm in flip-flops. I realized that my flip-flops are sticking to the asphalt because they had just paved the roads.
Here I am with this 50-pound backpack. I blew out of my sandals. I got hot tar on my feet. These two old Thai men were sitting outside of the café; they were playing chess or something. These tears are just streaming down their face because it was the funniest thing they’ve ever seen to see this giant guy with this huge backpack peeling his sandals off the street and marching into the hotel.
Adam Stoker: [00:08:22] Oh, my gosh. That sounds like something I would do if I was in Thailand. That is such a funny experience. I do feel like you may have glossed over a little too quickly, you getting attacked by a peacock. How does one get attacked by a peacock?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:08:39] Well, when we first went to Cambodia, we were staying in- first we went to Phnom Penh, and we went to Sihanoukville. Sihanoukville at the time was this sleepy little community. Since then, it's been transformed through tourism development, part of this pearl of what used to be French Indochina. We were staying in this little guest house, and there was this resident peacock. I don't know what it was about this peacock, but it didn't like me. We had to come out of our room onto this veranda, the peacock was there, and it would just look at you. I thought I'd be able to sneak by it. The thing jumps up and sticks out these claws and has these big, like, scaly dinosaur claws and it's scratching me on the chest while it's flapping these giant wings. I turned and ran back into the little guest house and slammed the door. I thought, well, I'll try again another 15 minutes later. No, it's still there. 15 minutes later, nope, still there. An hour later, still there. It's two and a half hours before I could leave my room in any safety and security.
Adam Stoker: [00:09:34] Oh, man. Well, yeah, if I'm you, I stay away from peacocks for the rest of my life. There must be something about you, Jay.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:09:41] My family went to the Tracy Aviary here in Salt Lake City just this weekend. I saw a peacock and I turned and ran in the other direction.
Adam Stoker: [00:09:49] Get a little PTSD there?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:09:50] Absolutely.
Adam Stoker: [00:09:51] Well, Jay, I appreciate you giving us a little insight into your travel background. Sounds like an amazing experience you got to have. Man, experiences like that are so hard to come by. I'm really glad you got the opportunity to take that trip. I want to get to know you a little bit and allow our listeners to get to know you. Can you give us your background and what led you up to the creation of this company that has really taken the tourism industry by storm?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:10:18] Yeah. I've had a pretty nonlinear career path. In college, I fell in love with photography and I wanted to see the world through a photographic lens. That afforded me opportunities to travel. I became an Olympic-sponsored photographer. I was teaching photoshop and digital workflows that really introduced me to technology. The theme through my life has been this intersection of business, creativity, and technology. I did that for about 13 years. I wrote two books, I was a sponsored photographer, got to teach photo workshops in Scotland, France, Spain, Qatar. It was a remarkable part of my life. Then as I was getting ready to have my second child, I had gotten to the point where I didn't want to get on a plane to collect a paycheck. I started to look for something a little closer to home. I was writing stories for a local publication and I happened to do one on this new tourism director at the Utah Office of Tourism. She just sounded like this remarkable person.
By way of – chance, she had an open position. I applied and it ended up being this unconventional fit. But I joined the Office of Tourism. That's where I got introduced to the world of DMOs. I never heard of a DMO, didn't know what DMOs did, didn't really know what was going to be asked of me. But as many of you are listeners know, because they work in DMOs, it's a remarkable career. You have this privileged position to be an ambassador for your community. And in talking with DMOs, as I know you speak to DMOs all over the country, they're tremendous advocates for their communities and for tourism opportunities is to see the world through their perspective is a true gift. I was six and a half years at the Utah Office of Tourism. I had far more stories than we have time for today. But one of the things I noticed is that the public sector was using data in a way that was just not available in the private sector, particularly in the tourism space.
Things like big data, machine learning, deep analytics, combing over these really rich data sets for insights for strategic planning and strategic insight, we don't have a cash register. We don't have that point of sale. Ultimately, that led me to sitting down with who became my business partner, Darren Dunn, who was also in the tourism space in a different startup. He saw the same challenge all over the world, that everyone that was in the DMO space was hungry for using data. They want to make good decisions, they want to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars, but they didn't really have the tools to do that. That observation and the partnership that we brought together led us to creating Zartico.
Adam Stoker: [00:12:59] Very cool. One of the things that I didn't hear there, were you originally from Utah, or is that somewhere you moved over time? I didn't hear where your roots are.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:13:10] Yes, my roots are in Colorado. I was born in Boulder, Colorado. I grew up in Littleton and family moved out to the San Francisco Bay area. I promptly hurried back to the University of Colorado at Boulder because I love being near the mountains. Then around 14 years ago, my wife and I moved to Salt Lake area because we were introduced to a common friend. The director at the Office of Tourism here, she says that Salt Lake is the city that Denver claims to be. It's such an apt analogy because we have the mountains so close, we have the city, we have great nightlife. We're in a really goldilocks phase here in Salt Lake. It's been a great home for us.
Adam Stoker: [00:13:46] Very cool. Okay. Awesome. Colorado to San Francisco, you split the difference right here in Utah.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:13:52] Indeed.
Adam Stoker: [00:13:54] Well, good stuff, Jay. It's fun to hear how you got where you got. One thing that I feel we don't give enough credit to is the different journeys that we go on throughout our careers, we don't understand how the puzzle pieces are all going to fit together until later, right? You start out as a photographer. Then you do a variety of positions at the Utah Office of Tourism, all setting you up to recognize this problem with data and leading you to eventually start Zartico. Started out as Entrada Insights, right? Then rebrand it to Zartico. How long ago was that? A year, year and a half?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:14:34] That was a little over two years ago.
Adam Stoker: [00:14:36] Oh, my goodness. I can't believe it's been that long. Time flies when you're having fun, right?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:14:40] Yeah, it does. Start up some days it feels like dog years. Sometimes when we look around the table, we talk about it's only been two years since that person joined, or a year and a half since that person joined. They are such a part of the team, they are such a part of the culture and they've contributed so much. We're about 60 people strong now. The team has this breadth of experience and perspective and creativity and they're all builders. They love building and creating and shaping whether they're in a technical role, a nontechnical role, an advisor role, they’re all builders. In many respects, we think of them all as founders of this company because they're contributing to building this remarkable thing piece by piece.
I think when you hear startup stories, it's often the founders get a lot of the glory. But ultimately, it's the full team effort of everyone building and showing up with our best self, day after day after day. That's how those great things actually get done.
Adam Stoker: [00:15:37] Absolutely. I think another thing that you guys have done that I haven't ever seen anybody else do the way you do. In fact, even Darren, your business partner, has the title on his business card, Lobby Bar, right? You guys at every event; you own the lobby bar. I actually had someone tell me that I'm trying to remember what event, I think it was Estow that you guys actually, I think you sponsored the Lobby Bar for the first time, which has never really been a paid sponsorship in the past. You guys really owned it and that's where everybody was hanging out and having a good time. I think that's a fascinating strategy that you guys have developed.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:16:18] Well, part of the DNA is that travel should be fun. We work in a remarkable industry. We get to have these exceptional experiences. It's full of people who enjoy having fun. The convivial nature of being around each other, and especially after not being able to travel for a couple of years, having an opportunity to sponsor the Lobby Bar where it was a chance for people to just unwind, to be themselves, to have good conversations, it fit really nicely with what we want to accomplish.
Adam Stoker: [00:16:46] Cool. Well, let me ask you. This will probably be my last question about the founding and creation of Zartico. Then we'll move on to some of the really amazing things that are about to come out that you're excited to talk about. What is it like to have an idea in your head of something that might be of value to the industry and then to watch it go and obviously you weren't watching, you were well in the middle of it, but to see it go from idea to one of the more significant software resources in the industry, to have 60 people, as you said, to bring in a CEO like Sarah Lehman to run the organization, what's it like to take an idea and watch it come to life the way you have?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:17:29] It feels like a bit of a dream in many days, I won't lie. Because putting something out to the world and seeing the world react to it as enthusiastically as it has, to grow as quickly as it has, to attract the people that we have on our team and our partners, to see the really exceptional insights and coming from that position of being on the leadership team at the Utah Office of Tourism and knowing the challenges that we wrestled with our communities within the state of Utah and seeing the similar challenges that other partners have and how they're able to put this tool to use for the betterment of their community, I kind of struggle to find words to really put it into place because it's an exceptional thing. It's in some ways a bit like parenting that you help to mentor something and set something in motion and then it becomes takes on a life of its own and really grows into something of its own.
Adam Stoker: [00:18:22] I love it. I really admire what you guys have built and watching you do that has been amazing. Anyway, fun to watch. As an entrepreneur, that's really where I like to focus, right, is in that creation story. But I want to skip to the exciting part for the industry because a lot of people have heard your story, but they haven't heard of some of the products and initiatives that they can expect to see rolling out over the next several months. First of all, before we get into specific capabilities and products, you have this concept of the five foundations for destinations. I'm wondering if you can give us that breakdown before we dive into the actual product.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:19:04] Yeah. Let me give you a little bit of a backstory into it. As we started working with these partners and as the number of partners signed on grew, we found that there's no consistency or continuity among how destinations or DMOs measure their efforts, that’s reflected in a lot of the challenges that we face with regard to funding. There isn't a common vocabulary of how we articulate what a DMO does and the benefit that it provides the community.
Adam Stoker: [00:19:29] How many different types of acronyms are there for bed tax? Right? Every single state seems to have a different acronym they use.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:19:39] Everyone looks at it a little differently. I mean, we'd see some partners that have a 100-page board report. That's a lot of time and resource investment that gets put into that, a lot of thought and care. One of the things I did in my prior role is I worked on two initiatives that were led through the trade organization. These were around best practices. One was best practices around how you store, maintain, and transmit your digital files as a photographer. The other one is around how you take advantage of new and emerging business models. Seeing how beneficial it is when you have an entity with a large view of the industry to be able to put something out and say, this is what we see as the best practices.
We've developed these five foundations. These are their framework for thinking about the activities that a destination organization does. Not necessarily prescriptive, but different metrics fit within that depending upon the size, the budget, the scope and the responsibility of that destination organization.
Those five, are something that we think of as open source. We're putting it out to the community through education and thought leadership. We are in early stages of talks and partnerships in refining this idea with the trade organizations. We want to continue to put it out there and bring the data that we have out to the community so that everyone can benefit from it, whether they're a Zartico subscriber or not. We want everyone to be able to take advantage of these.
The five foundations are first, demand generation. Everyone typically thinks of generating demand through great marketing, through compelling podcasts, or rich content, TV ads. All those things around demand generation. The nuance, the flavor that we're adding to that is really making sure that you're attracting the right types of visitors at the right time who are in line with your shared community values. Are you bringing the people that help to enrich the destination to help to support and nourish the community that you have there?
Demand generation is number one. Visitor distribution is number two. Initially, when we started the company, we thought we were going to be doing a lot more on marketing, but the hunger is really around how do we better utilize and funnel this demand generation into what is really like a yield management strategy. Every destination is in the physical world. We've got a fixed number of hotel rooms, parking spaces downtown, number of restaurants that we have on Main Street. How do we use that most effectively? Number three is economic opportunity. How are you channeling this visitor spending to the betterment of the community? That's entrepreneurship opportunities, that's rural economic development, that's helping to nourish small businesses, women and minority-owned businesses in your community; those are going to make for a greater resident quality of life. Fourth is accountability to your community. Fifth is stability, stability and funding and stability in staff. Those are the five foundations of a framework that we're building around.
Adam Stoker: [00:22:30] I love that. In our previous conversation, what stood out to me is if a DMO can essentially quantify the value that's being provided in each of those five foundations for the destination, they will know they're doing a wonderful job and the community will know that they're doing a wonderful job. When it comes to visitor distribution, which was your second one, that one is really interesting to me because historically it was generate demand, generate demand, generate demand. Those are the three foundations.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:23:03] Heads in beds, heads in beds, heads in beds.
Adam Stoker: [00:23:04] Right, it was all about generating demand. Yeah, exactly. As I hear you talk about visitor distribution, the big I think fallacy that came along with this constant generate demand initiative is we were driving just more people to the same 10% of the destination that wasn't equipped to receive them, and then we started calling it over tourism. Right?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:23:27] Right.
Adam Stoker: [00:23:28] This concept of visitor distribution I think is so critical for any destination to pay attention to and make sure that they're quantifying because if you're just driving more demand to a small portion of the destination that can't handle the additional traffic, you're not benefiting the destination, your numbers might improve a little bit but the quality of life for the residents isn't improving at all. I really like that that’s your second foundation. I think that's a really important part of what every destination should be doing. It takes a lot more work than just heads in beds.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:24:02] Absolutely. It's a very different way of thinking about all of the activities that a DMO does. Thinking through, where is my opportunity? Where am I busy? That's a distribution seasonally. You might have shoulder season, the winter season and off-season that you need to market differently. That's also thinking about it geographically. If you're a large state, obviously you have a very diverse geographic set of communities to distribute visitation to but it's also if you're a county DMO thinking about in terms of people tend to go to this neighborhood, they tend to go to Main Street. How do I get people off the beaten path into other parts of the community?
The benefits from that become really profound. One of the great privileges of being able to see all this rich data. We license this data set that's like 5% of all of the credit card transactions in the United States. When we talk about where we see visitor spending, we quite literally have the receipts to show you. We can see this economic opportunity that comes from the visitor economy and it never ceases to surprise me. 11% of all of supermarket spending in the United States is from visitors. You don't think of your supermarket grocer, your store manager as part of your visitor economy but we can show you the receipts and the spending on retail --
Adam Stoker: [00:25:17] Wow.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:25:18] -- the visitation to hospitals and medical centers from people traveling from outside the region. Those are generating those heads in beds, but they're not necessarily only in the way that you think of it. That visitor distribution is a broader way, a more holistic way of thinking about your visitor economy. When you think about that visitor distribution over the course of the year rather than just looking at seasonal workers, you're trying to get those year-round full-time employees into that community, giving opportunities for independent businesses to take root and those independent businesses that feed into the economic opportunity.
Those are the folks who are going to have reflect the unique character, the unique reasons why a person visited your destination. It becomes this positively reinforcing cycle. You've got this unique community character that people want to come to visit, that residents want to live in, that in turn makes the marketing piece easier. The marketing piece is going to continue to drive demand where you want to distribute that demand more broadly through the community and through the course of the year.
Adam Stoker: [00:26:17] I'm still flabbergasted by this 11% number for the grocery store spending, 11% of it is visitors. That's fascinating to me. One of the reasons that I wanted to have you on is these five foundations are one thing. Right? Destinations needing to understand the five foundations and have data and quantify the value they're bringing with each of these five foundations. Then when you start to ask the question, well, is that good? Once I've quantified how am I doing?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:26:47] Yeah.
Adam Stoker: [00:26:48] Right? Because the community might judge how you're doing based on ambiguous metrics, but the reality is where do I stand compared to the rest of the industry? That's the power I think of this new introduction that you've got coming to the industry. You are now curating the data that you're generating destination by destination into industry-level benchmarks. I'd love to hear more about that.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:27:14] Yeah, you're absolutely right because that is always a challenge. I've done this. How am I doing relative to my peers? How am I doing? Am I doing well or do I have some opportunities to move for improvement? We are introducing within 3.0 of our operating system. This notion of benchmarks and this takes anonymized aggregated data across our partners. We've been very careful at choosing those that are not influenced by budget or size of an organization. A large state organization is on a level playing field with a small county DMO. We've built out a whole series of benchmarks to start that process of looking at how am I doing? How am I performing? Also, it is not intended to be a right answer.
A benchmark is just a benchmark. It's another point of data within which you can understand your own opportunities and your own improvement. We are in the beta phase with a number of clients right now and this is an area that's gotten a lot of really positive feedback. We've got around eight benchmarks that we're rolling out in this first release. Those are things from like your overnight to day trip ratio. You understand, am I primarily a day visitation or am I primarily getting overnight visitors?
If you're thinking of a day visitation, if that's primarily who your visitors are today and you see that there's an opportunity to move towards more overnight, that's going to change the amount of money that people spend in your community. It's going to increase that hotel occupancy. It will get the heads in beds and it will make for a calmer sense of visitation.
Another one that we have, that has really been adopted widely is this visitor-to-resident ratio because we're looking at both residents and visitors in our geolocation data. We are able to see okay for a destination. How many visitors on a given day are there relative to how many residents? Looking at the benchmark, if you're kind of at a 1:1 or below, you've got plenty of capacity. You're not likely to have a lot of resident friction. You’re between 1 and 1.5, that's kind of a yellow zone where it starts to ramp up. You get above 1.5 and you're going to start to need to be a lot more proactive in that resident outreach and that community outreach because those residents start to feel that friction of maybe they're losing a little bit of control. They have to wait in line for their favorite restaurant or they can't get a parking space or they just start to feel like the community may not be theirs in the way that it was just a couple of years ago.
That visitor-to-resident ratio and the benchmark that comes from it has been really transformative for the visitor distribution and resident quality of life.
Adam Stoker: [00:29:37] Okay. I was going to ask you about with these benchmarks, you said there's eight different data points or excuse me, benchmarks that you're using as kind of your anchor data points in this first benchmarking, I don't know, would you call it a product or feature? How do you describe it?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:29:55] Yeah. We look at this as a key feature as part of our new release 3.0 that's coming out very soon.
Adam Stoker: [00:30:00] Perfect. Perfect. Okay. As we're looking at these data points, one of the ones that you mentioned is the visitor-to-resident ratio. The first one that you mentioned was day trips versus overnight. What else can people expect to see? What other benchmarks? That's two of the eight.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:30:15] Yes. We've tried to look at some key strategic decisions. What is a barometer that you would want to look at as a DMO? One of the things that you have control over is you've got your website. It's one of the few places where you've owned property. It is the front door to your destination. One of the great ways of measuring your awareness among visitors as well as your authority in terms of who's travel planning and how the search engines see your destination website and authority at being able to answer the questions related to travel planning is organic search and paid search. We look at those two in combination with one another.
You can see, well here's the percentage of my total traffic that's coming from paid and organic search and how that aligns with the benchmark and that helps to inform your strategy. We've seen some partners that they've got an opportunity to add a little bit more on the CPC to ramp up and gather more about market share. We've seen some other folks that are overpaying for CPC because it's likely traffic that they would get for free but because they're paid search is so high. This benchmark helps them get that external view and go, “Oh well let me ask some more questions and see if maybe there's something a little bit differently that I'd want to do.”
We also look at because we get that rich credit card data. We will look at your average visitor spend. That varies a little bit more destination to destination. You can imagine a luxury ski town versus a budget destination. They're going to have pretty different rates in terms of average visitor spend. But when you look at something like, what's my average visitor spending? What's that rate of change over the course of this year? That helps you understand seeing a higher average visitor spending that because inflation is really high right now and you have to spend a lot for gas or hotel rates are high or am I outpacing the industry norm? That's the way that you can get that external reference.
We also look at your spending at fast food versus your sit-down restaurant. Again, that's not the sole measure. We look at many of these benchmarks just like when you go to the doctor's office, and they take your pulse, they take your temperature, they take your blood pressure. Those by themselves are good diagnostics, but they also help you uncover other places where you want to look. That fast food versus restaurants is an indicator of, are people stopping. Are they sitting down? Are they enjoying the locally owned businesses, those restaurants that are within your community?
For many of our partners, they're wanting to promote their food scene because those restaurants were hit really hard in COVID. The more they're able to do focus promotions around those restaurants, that's the way that they can help to drive local entrepreneurship stimulate the jobs in their community, and keep that dollar that's invested in their community.
Adam Stoker: [00:32:49] That was really interesting to me, the fast food versus the sit-down dining restaurant. The reason that's interesting to me is I would say most tourism destinations if they're going to talk about dining, I think they would want to drive as much traffic as possible to their sit-down restaurants. Right?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:33:05] Yeah.
Adam Stoker: [00:33:06] That doesn't mean we don't want fast food restaurants. Of course, we want fast food restaurants because some people want something quick. If you want to be known for your dining, I don't think Chick-fil-A is going to cut it. Right? My question here is, can destinations also use this if they see that, okay, we're way below the industry benchmark for sit-down restaurants? Do we need to add product? Do we need to do a better job of promoting our sit-down restaurant product when people come to town? What I'm asking is what are the levers that you're going to pull once you start to get some of this data?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:33:39] Yeah. Once you start to get some of the data, we can look at it in a couple of different ways. One of the ways is exactly as you described it, Adam as, okay. We've got people who are coming for fast food. Are they driving through? Or we just passed through destination right now? Or are they staying and lingering a little bit longer? This is where it's this initial diagnostic that opens to some additional questions.
The next part might be, all right, well, we've got a product, we've got a really good product. We've got a unique food scene that's here. Let's make sure that we're promoting it. Let's bring that to the surface. Let's celebrate it. Let's celebrate the culinary heritage that we have in our areas. That's part two of it.
Part three of it is then starting to tease apart your visitation. Say, okay, of all of my visitors, are there some cohorts that tend to spend more on sit-down restaurants? Now I start to think about turning the level of that demand generation. Oh, I see that this market, these folks are coming, they're staying, they're sitting down, and they're spending more. These are the type of visitors that I want to deliberately attract more of. I might have less of them in volume but they may be spending more. Over the longer term, that's an investment that I want to nourish, I want to sustain. I want to focus on bringing more of those types of people to my community.
Adam Stoker: [00:34:50] Makes a lot of sense. I'll let you actually, we'll go through the other benchmarks that you've got coming. Maybe as people go check out your rollout, we've got a few minutes left and I want to talk more about, okay, a lot of people in the industry are using your product right now. Some are using a competitive product. There are other products out there that are attempting to do some of the things that you do. What's this rollout going to look like? You said you're in the beta phase. Is the next step for you to roll it out to everyone that has access to your product? Will you be picking some immediate customers to give a chance and crack at it first? What's this going to look like for your 3.0 rollout?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:35:29] Oh yeah, externally one of our company goals is to provide the clearest view of the visitor economy. Internally, one of our company goals is to be the most innovative technology company in the space. We're really proud that this week we will have rolled out feature improvements on 21 straight weeks, which is a great milestone. This will be our third major release in just three years of the company.
When we think about 3.0, we really took to heart all of the feedback that we got from our partners. We've got this remarkable team of advisors who is working every day with the partners throughout the industry, helping them answer questions using data. The spectrum of the questions that are being answered is it really runs the entire gamut of what you can imagine destinations are involved in.
What we've done is we've spent the last six months distilling down, curating, and cultivating all of those questions that are the opportunities that we weren't meeting in our existing platform. We went back to the drawing board and we've been rebuilding each of these module by module, insight by insight. One of the things that we're most proud of with 3.0 is the ease of use, the streamlined ability to answer questions that these are a lot more focused. Not around data set by dataset, but because of the way we've structured the data behind the scenes, we have this integrated data model.
It sounds really techie, but it's really a structure internally with the way the different data sets talk together. What that does for the end user? It allows them to answer a question like, who are my best markets? Who are the markets that I should be advertising more? Where are people are traveling to in my destination? Why are they traveling to this destination? Look across four, five, or six different data sets to have the module kind of walk them through that decision tree to help them get to insights quicker, easier and more effectively.
As we roll this out, we're in beta right now. When we hit our official release date, we're going to roll it out to all of our Zartico subscribers. We're going to run our 2.0 and our 3.0 together for a month so that they can have a transitionary period because we know everyone has a tight reporting cycle. We want to make it a very smooth and easy user experience. Everyone's eager to move on to this new 3.0 platform because the feedback that we've been getting from the beta partners is exceptional.
Adam Stoker: [00:37:45] Great. When is this projected release date or at least give me a range of dates that people can kind of watch for this?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:37:51] September 22nd is our release date.
Adam Stoker: [00:37:53] Boom. September 22nd.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:37:54] Boom.
Adam Stoker: [00:37:55] That's exciting. Less than a month away.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:37:57] Indeed. It's the home stretch and we feel so good about it.
Adam Stoker: [00:37:59] Oh fantastic. Okay. As a marketer, Jay, the thing that's exciting to me is one of the biggest frustrations that I've had in this industry since I got in is some of the difficulty in attribution of what of our efforts are actually working and what or not. It's that old adage. I know half my marketing is working, I just don't know which half. Right? Sometimes that just drives me crazy. As I look at some of these benchmarks because right now, I can tell a destination with different KPI s that we've created, how is paid search doing? How is SEO doing?
What this gives us now is industry benchmarks to look at it and say, “Okay, we might know that we're improving month over month, that our cost per click is getting a little bit better. Our cost per lead is getting a little bit better and those types of things but now I'm also going to know how do I stack up against the rest of the industry.” For a marketer in the space, I feel like this is going to unlock a lot more evaluation and even accountability for the marketing partners that people have for the internal teams that destinations have and allow destinations to honestly do a better job of evaluating their marketing efforts whether in-house or out of house with an external partner.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:39:18] Yeah. Everyone's wanting to do the very best with the dollars that they have allocated. We've taken a little bit of a different approach when we think about how we approach attribution and communication of our partners’ efforts. One of the tools that we built that we're rolling out in terms of it’s been in beta for a long period of time. We are rolling it out as an official general release in 3.0 is our website contribution because one of the few places that you can control as a DMO is your website. Using the geolocation data, we're able to link together that traffic that's driving back to the website, those efforts with the visitation and market. We can see people searching for the places that they're actually going and then we can compare that to your non-website attributed geolocation data and start to see how are you as a DMO specifically influencing where and when and how people are traveling to your destination.
It isn't again just looking at that volume number because that volume number if you're already having capacity issues that can lead you the wrong way because a really good ROI is going to drive more people in that period of time that are already highly concentrated. We wanted to build those tools to give you a little bit more precision, a little bit more nuance, a little bit more visibility into very specifically the role of the DMO, and guiding those demand generation activities and understand how, where, when, and why they're visiting.
Adam Stoker: [00:40:42] By benchmarking that data point specifically the website versus the actual visitation, hey you got 50 visitors that went to your website and then came to the destination. Is that good?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:40:52] Right.
Adam Stoker: [00:40:53] Right? I don't know. Is that good? Then it's like well other destinations on average are getting 4,000. Okay, that's bad, 50 is bad. Right?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:41:03] Yes.
Adam Stoker: [00:41:04] But anyway, the whole thing I'm trying to get at is we're now going to be able, it's not meant to say, “Oh man I'm super competitive with this one destination, I got to beat them out.” It's more along the lines of, where do I stand versus an aggregate of the rest of the industry so that I can do a better job of holding either my partners accountable, my team accountable, or the community accountable, or to hold me accountable.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:41:28] Absolutely. To kind of pull it around full circle to that accountability, what we've seen through many of our partners is when they articulate a really clear strategy, we are deliberately going to go and accomplish this. It might be that we're going to elevate our restaurants within our community. We are going to drive shoulder season visitation. We are going to cultivate this specific market. When they articulate that as a specific goal and then measure against that goal, they are good with their stakeholders because they're setting forth a strategy, they are incorporating the stakeholders into that strategy and in particular when they connect that through to what the benefit is to the community, then they are able to deliver on that in a way that generates more confidence among the stakeholders. It helps to better articulate what the DMO actually does and that benefit to the community.
What we see is those benchmarks, that accountability, it has a lot of opportunity for the DMO to really show what they do and more clearly and transparently articulate all of the great benefits that their hard work does in benefiting the community that they live in.
Adam Stoker: [00:42:33] I love it. Jay, thanks for previewing the 3.0 launch. I'm really excited for you. The technology that you've provided to the industry has really been eye-opening for me, for a lot of the different destinations that we work with. Is there anything that I haven't asked you about this new rollout that you feel like would be good for our listeners to be aware of?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:42:55] I'll take it out of something that's Zartico specific and more just think about the industry as a whole. That what we've seen is a recipe for success across many of our destinations is really reaching out to your community, reaching out to your stakeholders, putting on the lens of your residents as you're thinking about how you're communicating the role of the DMO. We built a lot of tools around how to do that specifically but at the end of the day, the more closely you can align your DMO efforts, your strategic goals and your plans with those things that are beneficial to the communities and residents’ quality of life, those are things like how tax revenues pay for school, they pay for fire, they pay for roads, they pay for new bike paths. How the visitor spending, youth sports tournaments, for example, creates better ball fields for their kids to play on.
All of those things generate this really powerful synergy in this alignment. What we've seen throughout all of these destinations particularly coming out of COVID is that the DMO is really the hidden engine of the economic opportunity in that community. For all of your listeners who are working in DMOs, you've got this really exceptional role. You're doing great work and we're really proud to be helping to equip you and serve your communities even more effectively.
Adam Stoker: [00:44:09] Great stuff, Jay. If people want to learn more about you or Zartico, or the 3.0 rollout, where's the best place for them to do so?
Jay Kinghorn: [00:44:18] Zartico.com. It's going to be your best place to learn more.
Adam Stoker: [00:44:21] Great. Jay, thanks so much. We really appreciate your time.
Jay Kinghorn: [00:44:23] Thanks Adam. It was a pleasure.
Adam Stoker: [00:44:25] Thanks everybody for listening. If you enjoyed today's show, please don't forget to leave us a rating or review. It really helps us continue to bring you amazing guests like Jay, Thanks everybody and have a great week.
Hey everybody, I want to tell you about an event that's coming up that I am really, really excited about. My friend Jennifer Barbee, she's with Destination Innovate. She is starting an event called DestiCon. If you want to learn about it, it's at DestiCon.us. My listeners can actually get a discount. I'll show you the details of that at the end of this quick promo. Really excited for this event. It's in Ruston, Louisiana November 16th through the 18th of this year.
Jennifer describes it as a conference for disruptors. One thing that I want to make sure I point out is it's not just for DMOs but also for stakeholders and members of the destination that want to learn how to do a better job of working with the DMOs. I think it's going to be a fantastic conference. If you're a disruptor in the industry you're definitely going to want to go to DestiCon. Oh, by the way I'm excited and honored to have been invited to be a keynote speaker at that event. I'll be talking about the how behind making tourism a community shared value in your destination, which is going to be a super important conversation, I'm really excited to have it.
In addition, any of my listeners that would like to go to this event, I know you'd like a discount, you can actually use the coupon code DMP, that's for Destination Marketing Podcast, DMP2022 at checkout and you'll get an extra 15% off. Can't wait for the event, I'm so excited to see you there November 16th through 18th in Ruston, Louisiana.
[End of transcript]
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