At a glance
| GroundZones | Excel or Google Sheets | |
|---|---|---|
| Every hotel on a map | Yes, as pins coloured by zone | No. Excel map charts cannot plot street addresses, and Sheets has no map view |
| Geocode street addresses | Yes, the whole file at once | Not built in. Sheets can use Apps Script, capped at 1,000 geocodes a day on a free account |
| Driving distance from the airport | Yes, from the terminal to every hotel | Not built in. Sheets can use Apps Script, capped at 1,000 direction queries a day on a free account |
| Zone by distance band or drawn area | Yes | No |
| Zone by ZIP code or city | Yes | Yes, with a lookup formula |
| Zone many hotels at once | Box-select a district on the map | Sort the rows, then fill down |
| Spot a mis-zoned hotel | It is the wrong colour among its neighbours | Only by reading addresses |
| Merge next quarter's roster | Yes, duplicates skipped, existing zones kept | By hand, with lookups |
| Export in your original columns | CSV or XLSX, zone filled in | It is already the file |
| Price | From $75 a month for one airport. 30 days free | Usually already paid for |
The job a spreadsheet is being asked to do
Ground transportation suppliers who sell airport transfers through Expedia and other partners keep a hotel association file: every hotel they serve near an airport, each assigned to a pricing zone. When the roster changes, the file changes with it.
Most operators keep that file in Excel or Google Sheets and zone it one row at a time: read the address, estimate how far the hotel is from the airport, type a zone, move on. The spreadsheet is a fine container for the answer. It is a poor place to work the answer out, because the question is about geography and a grid of text cannot show geography.
Where spreadsheets run out
None of this is a flaw in Excel or Sheets. They are general tools, and zoning hotels by distance from an airport is a specific, geographic job.
- No street-level map. Microsoft's own documentation says Excel map charts "can only plot high-level geographic details, so latitude/longitude, and street address mapping isn't supported." Excel's Geography data type recognises countries, provinces, territories and cities, not individual hotel addresses.
- No driving distance. Neither product has a driving-distance function. In Google Sheets the usual workaround is an Apps Script custom function that calls Google Maps, and Google caps those at 1,000 direction queries and 1,000 geocodes a day on a consumer account, or 10,000 on Google Workspace, with 30 seconds per custom function call. A 2,000-hotel file uses two days of a free account's quota before any zoning starts.
- Mistakes are invisible. Four hotels on the same street can end up in three zones, and nothing in the grid will tell you.
- Every roster update starts over. New hotels have to be found among the old ones, located, and zoned by hand.
How GroundZones does the same job
Upload the CSV or XLSX and match your columns once; the layout is remembered for next time. Choose the airport by its IATA code from 9,055 airports. The origin is placed at the terminal rather than the middle of the airfield, and every hotel gets its driving distance and time from it.
Zone rules take the first pass: distance bands measured from the terminal, polygons you draw around a district, or lists of ZIP codes and cities. You preview the result and see any hotel two rules both claim before anything is applied. Then you fix the edges by hand: drag a box over a neighbourhood, pick a zone, and every hotel inside moves together.
The spreadsheet does not go away. The table sits beside the map with your columns in your order, every cell editable, and it shares one selection with the map. When you are done, export CSV or XLSX with your original headers and the zone column filled in. The project stays saved, with up to 50 restorable versions, so next quarter you merge the new roster in and zone only what changed.
What you give up by moving
GroundZones is another tool with a monthly price per airport, and it does one thing: zone hotels around airports. Accounts are single-user today, so a file cannot be edited by several colleagues at once the way a shared Google Sheet can.
Which should you choose?
Choose GroundZones if
- Your file has hundreds or thousands of hotels
- Zones depend on distance from the airport, or on districts that ZIP codes do not follow
- You re-zone every time the roster changes and want to fix only what is new
- Someone has to check the zoning before the file goes out
Choose Excel or Google Sheets if
- The file is a few dozen hotels
- Every zone is a clean list of ZIP codes and a lookup formula already does the job
- You zone the file once and never come back to it
Frequently asked questions
Can Excel calculate the driving distance from an airport to a list of hotels?
Not on its own. Excel has no driving-distance function, and its map charts cannot plot street addresses, so people turn to add-ins or scripts that call a mapping service. GroundZones measures the driving distance and time from the airport terminal to every hotel in the file once you set the airport.
Can Google Sheets calculate driving distance?
Only through Apps Script custom functions that call Google Maps, and those are rate limited: Google allows 1,000 direction queries a day on a consumer account and 10,000 on Google Workspace. A 2,000-hotel file takes two days of a free account's quota.
Do I have to give up my spreadsheet?
No. GroundZones reads your CSV or XLSX, keeps your columns, and exports the same file back with the zone filled in. The table view shows the file beside the map, and every cell is editable.
What does GroundZones cost?
One airport is $75 a month. Each additional airport up to ten is $22 a month, then $9 each up to 50 and $3 each after that. Every account starts with 30 days free and no card.
Try it on your own hotel file.
Your first 30 days are free, with no card. Upload the file you were about to open in Excel and see your first zone in a few minutes.
Sources
Details about Excel or Google Sheets were checked against these pages on September 11, 2026. Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@groundzones.com and we will correct it.
- Microsoft Support: Create a Map chart in Excel
- Microsoft Support: Excel data types, Stocks and Geography
- Google for Developers: Quotas for Google Services (Apps Script)
Product names on this page are trademarks of their respective owners, used only to identify them. GroundZones is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.