GroundZones vs Maptive for zoning hotels around an airport

Maptive is general-purpose mapping software: it advertises more than 60 mapping tools, and it is used for sales territories, routing, and analysis across many industries. Hotel zoning is one of many jobs it can be bent to.

GroundZones does one job. It knows what an airport is, what a hotel association file looks like, and that the answer has to go back out as the same spreadsheet with a zone column. Everything in it is arranged around that workflow, which is why it does less than Maptive in general and fewer steps in particular.

In Maptive, driving distance comes from its Distance Matrix Calculator, which pairs an origin list with a destination list and returns driving distance and drive time as a table you read in Maptive or download as XLS or CSV. To zone by that number you work from the table, or draw distance rings and drive-time areas on the map, then lasso markers and use Batch Edit to set a column for everything inside. Maptive's Boundary tool exports the data in each territory along with the territory's name.

In GroundZones you type the airport code, and the origin is placed at the terminal for any of 9,055 airports. Every hotel gets its driving distance and time, and that distance is what the zone rules read. You add rules (distance bands, drawn polygons, ZIP codes, cities), preview the result with any conflicts shown, apply it, fix the edges by box-selecting on the map, and export the file in its original columns with the zone filled in.

The two products bill on different units. Maptive bills per seat: Pro is $110 a month, or $1,250 a year, for one user, with each additional Pro user at $750; Team is $220 a month or $2,500 a year for five users, and there is a 45-day pass for $250. GroundZones bills per airport: $65 a month for the first and $10 for each one after it. There is no platform fee, every plan includes up to five users, and above 25 airports it is a quote. Paid yearly, GroundZones is ten months of that: $650 a year for one airport.

One airport is $65, and five airports are $105, both below a single Maptive seat. A Maptive seat stays at $110 however many airports it covers, so for an operator with more markets than that it is the cheaper subscription. What it does not do is the per-market work: an operator with 20 airports pays GroundZones $255 a month, under $13 per airport, for the terminal origin, the distance on every hotel and the zone rules of each market, set up once and re-run on every new roster.

The units also diverge as a team grows. In Maptive a second person on Pro is another $750, and Team covers five. In GroundZones people are not what you pay for: every plan includes up to five, the account owner among them. The owner invites colleagues by email as admins, members who edit, or viewers who can only look and export, and the price stays the same whether that is two people or five.

What the per-airport price buys is the part Maptive leaves to you. There, every airport is another manual pass: build the origin and destination lists, run the matrix, carry the table back to your spreadsheet, draw the rings or territories, lasso and batch-edit, then export the boundary data. In GroundZones the airport is a code, the terminal is the origin, the driving distance is already on every hotel, and the rules stay with the project. Ten airports is ten sets of rules that run themselves the next time a roster lands, rather than ten runs of that manual work every time one does.

GroundZones does not map sales territories, plan routes, or analyse anything other than hotels around airports. If you need a general mapping tool for the whole company, Maptive is the better fit.