GroundZones user manual

1. On the dashboard, choose New Project, name it, and pick the airport from the list. Attach your hotel file if you have it ready.
2. In the Map Columns window, check that each dropdown points at the right column of your file, then choose Import Properties. Hotels without coordinates are placed on the map from their address.
3. Open Zone Rules in the left panel and choose + Add Rule once for each zone you need. Click a name to rename it (for example "Zone 1") and click the colour dot to change its colour. Leave the other cells empty.
4. On the map, hold Space and drag a box around a group of hotels. In the panel that appears at the top, open the zone dropdown and pick the zone. Repeat for each area. Use Ctrl + drag to add to a selection and Shift + drag to take hotels out of it.
5. Click any single hotel to open its popup and change its zone there, for the ones a box cannot catch cleanly.
6. Open the Table tab on the right edge and tick Check pins to list hotels whose location could not be confirmed. Fix or confirm each one.
7. Choose Export in the left panel (or XLSX / CSV in the table). You get your original columns back, in their original order, with the zone filled in.

1. Create the project and import the file as above.
2. Open Zone Rules, add one rule per zone, and fill in what defines each zone: a maximum distance in Dist, city names in City, ZIP codes in ZIPs, or a drawn area.
3. Under Assignment Mode, choose the mode that matches what you filled in. Distance Only is the simplest: it turns the distances into bands such as 0 to 7 miles and 7 to 15 miles.
4. Choose Apply Zoning Rules. Every hotel that matches a rule gets its zone, and the map is recoloured.
5. Tidy up by hand: box-select the hotels that landed in the wrong zone and move them, exactly as in the manual route.
6. Check pins, then export.

Your plan is counted in airports, called markets. The first time any project uses an airport, that airport becomes one of your markets, and the notice under the picker tells you exactly what will happen before you create anything:

• "{CODE} is already one of your markets - no change to your plan." You already hold this airport. A project there costs nothing extra, and a market holds up to five at a time.
• "{CODE} already has 5 projects, and a market holds up to 5. Delete one you no longer need to make room." The market is full, on any plan. Deleting a project frees its place; the same applies to Duplicate project and to moving a project to another airport. If your own work in an airport needs more, the notice gives the address to write to.
• "This makes {CODE} market 2 of 5. Markets are permanent." The airport is new and your plan has room. Tick "I understand {CODE} becomes a permanent market on my account." to continue. On a new account the notice also says "Opening your first airport starts your 14-day free trial."
• "{CODE} is a new market. Adding it changes your plan:" You subscribe already and the airport takes you past the number you pay for. The notice shows the new number of markets, the plan and what is charged today. Add market and continue bills your card at once.
• "{CODE} would be market 2, and your trial covers 1." Choose a plan first, with Choose a plan.
• A team member who is not an admin sees a note asking the workspace owner or an admin to add the market, because adding one is permanent and billed to the owner.

To start from an existing project, for next season's file or to try a different set of zones, hover its tile on the dashboard and choose the copy icon (Duplicate project). A new project named "{name} (copy)" appears with every hotel, every zone rule, the origin and the map settings of the original. The two are independent from then on: editing the copy never changes the original. Rename the copy with the pencil icon.

The copy uses the same airport, so it costs nothing extra. Snapshots and job history stay with the original. If you can see only some of the workspace's projects, the copy is placed outside any folder and you can edit it.

The bar across the top of every page. It holds the project switcher, Undo, Redo, History and Snapshots, the ZIP check (an amber ZIP issues badge when hotels are flagged), a ? that opens this manual, and Jobs, Team and Profile.

• On a narrow window the top bar folds itself: labels shrink to icons first, then the links move into a menu button. Every icon keeps its tooltip.

The map fills the centre of the page: one coloured dot per hotel, a red dot for the origin, and any areas you have drawn. Four things float on top of it — Search at the top left, Controls at the top right, Map Info at the bottom right, and the selection panel, which appears at the top only while hotels are selected.

• Controls and Map Info can be dragged by their header and folded with the arrow in it. They go back to their corner when the table is opened or closed.
• The table is the tab on the right edge. It slides out every hotel as a spreadsheet you can sort, filter, edit and export.

The Zone Management panel down the left side, in five sections that open and close: File Management, Set Origin Point, Zone Rules, ZIP Code Conflicts and Zone Statistics.

• Drag the right edge of the left panel to make it wider or narrower, and use the small arrow on that edge to fold it away. On a phone it opens from the layers button at the top left of the map.
• The sections of the left panel remember whether they were open, per browser. The first time, File Management and Set Origin Point are open and the other three are closed.

The window shows the file name with its number of rows and columns, a preview of the first five rows, and nine dropdowns under Column Mapping: Property Name, External ID, Address, City, State, ZIP Code, Country, Latitude and Longitude. Each one lists every header in your file, plus -- Not mapped --.

GroundZones fills the dropdowns in by reading your headers ("Hotel Name", "Postal Code", "Lat"...). It guesses; you confirm.

• You need at least one of Address, City or ZIP Code, or both Latitude and Longitude. Latitude and longitude only count as a pair.
• Map External ID whenever your file has a hotel ID. It is how GroundZones recognises a hotel it already has when you upload the next list.
• Columns you do not map are not lost. They are kept with each hotel, shown in the table, and written back into the export in their original position.

If the file already carries zones, choose that column under Sort into zones by column. Each different value becomes a zone with its own colour, every hotel starts in the zone the file gave it, and the zone is written back into that same column when you export. A hotel whose cell is empty starts unassigned, and an empty cell makes no zone. Leave the dropdown on -- Don't create zones -- to start with every hotel unassigned.

The zones created this way also get their cities, their ZIP codes and a maximum distance filled in from the hotels they contain, so they are ready to be used as rules later if you want. The Airport Code shown beside the option is the project's market and cannot be changed here.

When the project already has hotels, Property Import Mode asks what to do with them:

• Add new properties only (the default) keeps everything you have. A row whose External ID is already in the project is skipped, so uploading the same file twice is safe, and hotels you have zoned keep their zones. Nothing in the file reaches a hotel that is already here — a corrected address in it is ignored.
• Update existing properties, add the new ones is for a newer list of the same hotels. A row whose External ID is already in the project refreshes that hotel from the file — name, address, city, ZIP code, coordinates — and leaves the zone it is in alone. Rows that are new arrive unassigned, ready to zone. Hotels missing from the file are left where they are.
• Replace all properties deletes this project's hotels first and imports the file in their place, zones included: every hotel is zoned again from scratch. While it runs, the map is view-only for everyone in the project.

When you are creating zones from a column and the project already has zone rules, Existing Zone Rules offers Replace with new zone rules (your current rules are cleared, and a backup file is offered for download afterwards) or Keep existing zone rules (your rules stay as they are, and a zone in the file that has no rule yet gets one).

Automatically geocode properties missing coordinates is ticked by default. Leave it on unless every row already has a latitude and longitude.

Choose Import Properties. The window shows a progress bar (and a map joke or two) while the work runs on the server:

1. The rows are read. A row with no address, city, ZIP code or coordinates at all is left out.
2. Hotels without coordinates are placed from their address. Each answer is checked against the address that was asked for: a different street number, or a city and ZIP code that both disagree, flags the pin for review instead of passing it off as exact. An address the map does not have at all is placed in the middle of its town or postcode area, flagged the same way. A match on another continent than the airport is never used.
3. If you are creating zones from a column, the driving distance from the airport terminal to each hotel is measured, and a hotel no road reaches is flagged for review.
4. If you are creating zones from a column, the zones are created.

• Coordinates that are already in the file are trusted as they are and are never moved by the import.
• In Update existing properties mode, a column the file leaves blank never blanks what the project holds, and extra columns merge one by one, so a column the newer file drops keeps its value. An updated hotel whose address changed without coordinates beside it is placed again from the new address, and its measured distance is dropped, because it described the old building; if the map finds nothing for the new address, the hotel keeps the pin it had. New hotels arrive unassigned: to zone just those with your rules, apply them with Only hotels with no zone yet ticked.
• Without a zone column, distances are not measured during the import. They are measured when you ask for them (see Origin and distances) or when a rule needs them.
• State and country are tidied into two-letter codes ("Colorado" becomes "CO"; a blank country becomes "US"). Everything else is kept as you wrote it, including a ZIP code that a spreadsheet stripped of its leading zero.

The Upload Complete screen shows four counts: Properties Created, Geocoded, Zone Rules Created and Distances Calculated, with Properties Updated beside them after an update import. It also lists rows skipped because they already existed, hotels still missing coordinates, and up to ten row errors in the form "Row 12: ...", where the header is row 1. Choose Done to return to the map.

1. Open Zone Rules in the left panel.
2. Choose + Add Rule. A zone called "Zone 1" appears with a colour of its own. Choose it again for "Zone 2", and so on. Each new zone gets the colour that stands out most from the zones you already have, and never one that could be taken for the unassigned colour.
3. Click a zone's name to rename it, and press Enter. Name zones exactly as your rate sheet does.
4. Click the round colour dot to pick a different colour: drag in the picker, or click one of the swatches below it. A swatch drawn small looks like another zone's colour (hover it to see which), and the picker says "Looks like Zone 3 on the map" when the colour you chose does.

That is all a zone needs. The City, Dist and ZIPs cells can stay empty ("Any", "No limit", "None"): they only matter if you later use rules. If you created zones from a column during the upload, they are already here.

• Click the Color heading to give every zone a fresh colour at once. Each click is a different arrangement, every one chosen so that zones whose hotels sit side by side on the map get the most different colours. It is a single Undo step, but it is easy to do by accident.
• Renaming a zone renames it on every hotel in the project that has it.
• Deleting a zone with the x at the end of its row removes it from the list only. Hotels keep the zone name, without its colour, until you give them another zone.
• The Unassigned row at the bottom shows how many hotels have no zone yet. Click its dot to choose the colour unassigned hotels are drawn in.

• A whole zone at once. Under Controls, in Zone Visibility, the pointer icon at the end of a zone's row selects every hotel in that zone; the same icon on the Unassigned row selects every hotel without a zone. This is the quickest way to work through what is left.
• From the table. Click rows or their checkboxes; Shift + click selects a range; the checkbox in the header selects every row currently listed. The table and the map share one selection.
• A selected dot is drawn slightly larger. Map Info shows "Selected: 12" with a Clear link, and the range of driving distances in the selection.
• A box only catches hotels you can see: hotels in a zone you have hidden under Controls are left out. Selecting a zone with its pointer icon does include them.
• Move the pointer over the map before pressing Space, so the map is what hears the key. A plain drag always pans the map.

As soon as two or more hotels are selected (or one, if you used Ctrl + click or a box), a purple panel appears at the top of the map reading "12 properties selected", with the selection's distance range under it. You can drag it by its header.

1. Open the dropdown at the left of the panel. It shows the zone the selected hotels share, "N/A" if none of them has a zone, or "Mixed".
2. Pick a zone, or Unassigned to clear the zone.
3. The hotels change colour at once and the panel confirms: Rezoned 12 properties to "Zone 3".

• The whole change is one step in the history: Ctrl+Z puts every hotel back.
• If a colleague changed some of those hotels after your map loaded them, theirs are left as they are and the panel says how many: "... 2 changed by someone else".
• Only zones in the Zone Rules list are offered. Add a zone there first if you need a new one.
• When the zoning is done, Fill from Hotels above the rule table writes each zone's cities and ZIP codes into its rule (see The rule table).

Click a hotel to open its popup. The coloured Zone button at the bottom shows its zone: click it, pick another from the list, and it is saved. The rest of the popup is editable the same way: click a value, type, and press Enter (or click away) to save, Esc to cancel.

Open the Table tab on the right edge. Click the Zone cell of a row: a box opens with Unassigned, your zones (the list narrows as you type) and, when what you typed matches none of them, Create: .... Use the arrow keys and Enter, or click an option. Esc cancels. Clicking elsewhere closes the list without saving.

The table is the best place to zone by a column rather than by location: filter with the search box, tick the header checkbox to select everything listed, and pick the zone in the selection panel over the map.

Zone changes, confirmed pins and deletes happen in one go. Geocode always runs on the server, and so do Reverse and Distance on ten or more hotels: a progress bar appears in the panel with Pause, Resume and Cancel, and the selection is locked until it finishes. Cancel puts every hotel back as it was before the run.

Every one of these, once finished, is a single step in the history: Ctrl+Z puts the addresses, pins or distances back as they were.

• During an upload, only when you create zones from a column.
• When you ask: select hotels and choose Distance in the selection panel, or Distance in one hotel's popup. This always measures afresh.
• When rules run: every hotel is measured from the origin the run uses, so a moved pin or a new market is always taken into account. Routes already worked out are remembered, so an unchanged hotel costs nothing to measure again.
• When the market changes: every hotel is measured again from the new airport, by itself (see below).

Open Set Origin Point. The box reads "Market DEN" with a Change link. Choose it, pick another airport from the list, read the notice (a new airport becomes a permanent market, exactly as when creating a project), and choose Set market. The origin moves to the new terminal, the map centres on it, and every hotel is measured again from there: a banner at the top of the map shows the progress, with pause and cancel, and the map reloads when it is done.

To measure from a convention centre or a cruise terminal, choose the x on the origin chip ("Remove origin") and then click the map where the new origin should be. Distance, Apply Zoning Rules and the Cities Distance List all use it.

• Click the Zone, City or Dist heading to sort the list; it opens sorted by Zone. Click # to see the table's own order instead, and drag a rule by the handle on the left of its row to move it. Dropping a rule switches the list to that order. The order matters only when overlapping rules have the same distance (see When two rules claim a hotel).
• Download saves the rules as a file named for the project's airport, such as DEN_zone_rules.xlsx (with no rules yet, it saves a small CSV template to fill in). Upload replaces all the rules with the ones in a CSV or Excel file that has a zone name column and, optionally, city, maximum distance, ZIP codes and colour. It asks first, and drawn areas are not part of a rules file, so they are lost with the rules they belonged to.
• Fill from Hotels brings the table up to date with the map after you have zoned by hand, with no need to export the file and upload it again. Each zone's rule gets the cities and ZIP codes of the hotels now in that zone, replacing what its City and ZIPs cells hold, and a zone that has hotels and no rule gets one. A rule whose Dist is empty gets the distance of its zone's farthest hotel; a distance that is already there is kept, and so are colours and drawn areas. It asks first and says how many rules change. A cell is left alone when no hotel in the zone has that column filled in, and hotels with no zone are not read. One Ctrl+Z reverses it.
• Fill from Hotels reads distances, it does not measure them. Where a zone's hotels have none yet, the question says "No distance for Zone 1: its hotels have no distance yet. Select the hotels, choose Distance, then fill again." Do that, and the second fill adds the distance.
• What Fill from Hotels cannot do, it names in the question: a zone with more than one rule is left as it is, and the City cell holds 500 characters, so a zone with more cities than fit gets the first of them in alphabetical order. Outside the US the ZIPs cell gets the postcode area: the first three characters of a Canadian postal code or an Eircode, and any other postcode as it is written.
• Clear All deletes every rule after asking. Hotels keep their zones, and a snapshot named "Before deleting all zone rules" is saved first.
• If a colleague edits the same rule at the same time, you see "Someone else changed this zone rule. Showing their version." and your edit is dropped.

Under the table, Assignment Mode decides which of a rule's cells are read. The mode is chosen each time you apply; it is not saved with the project, and the page opens on City and Distance.

The rules are sorted by Dist and turned into bands that do not overlap: with zones at 7, 15 and 25 miles you get 0 to 7, 7 to 15 and 15 to 25. City, ZIPs and drawn areas are ignored.

• A rule with no Dist is left out of the run.
• A hotel exactly on a boundary goes to the nearer zone.
• A hotel beyond the largest distance matches nothing and keeps its zone. Give your outermost zone a generous maximum if it should catch everything else.
• Needs an origin.

Two choices appear when this mode is selected. The first is how a city is recognised:

• Match by city name (text comparison) compares the hotel's City column with the rule's list. The match ignores upper and lower case but is otherwise exact: "St. Louis" is not "Saint Louis". A hotel with no city never matches a rule that names cities; a rule with no city accepts any.
• Match by city boundaries ignores the City column and asks whether the hotel's pin lies inside the city's boundary from OpenStreetMap. It catches hotels whose City column names a suburb or is misspelt.

The second is City only (ignore distance limits). Ticked, the distance is not checked and no origin is needed: the city alone decides, and a rule with no city matches nothing.

With distance on, each rule's Dist is its own upper limit: a hotel matches when its city is in the rule's list and it is within that distance. "Zone 1, Denver, 7 mi" and "Zone 2, Aurora, 15 mi" take Denver hotels up to 7 miles and Aurora hotels up to 15. Two rules on the same city, say 7 and 15 miles, split that city at 7, because where two rules both claim a hotel the tighter one wins. A rule with no city matches any city, but only within its distance; a rule with no Dist matches its cities at any distance.

• By boundary, a city is matched by its name alone, so a name shared by towns in two states matches both. A city GroundZones has no boundary for matches nothing, without a message: turn on City Boundaries under Controls and look at the area first to see what is there.

A hotel matches a rule when its pin lies inside the area of one of the rule's ZIP codes, and (unless ZIP only (ignore distance limits) is ticked) it is within the rule's Dist. A rule with no ZIP codes is skipped; a rule with no distance matches on the area alone.

Selecting Custom Polygon lists your zones as chips under "Click to toggle visibility/editing:". A zone can have one area or several.

1. Click the chip of a zone that has no area yet. Drawing tools appear at the top left of the map, under the zoom buttons.
2. Choose the polygon tool and click around the area, finishing on the first point; or choose the rectangle tool and drag. The shape is saved to the zone as soon as it is closed, in the zone's colour. Lines that cross themselves are refused.
3. Draw another shape to add a second area to the same zone (the chip shows "x2").
4. Click anywhere else on the map, or choose another mode, to finish; the area stays shown. Clicking the chip again also finishes, and hides the area; click the chip once more to show it again and edit it: drag the handles with the edit tool and choose Save. A hidden area still counts when rules are applied.
5. Choose Apply Zoning Rules. Hotels inside an area get its zone; hotels outside every area keep what they had.

• On a chip, a tick means the area is shown and a crossed eye means it is hidden. Showing an area also opens it for editing.
• To remove a zone's areas, use the bin button beside its chip, or the delete tool on the map. Both save at once. To take back one city or ZIP area out of several, click it on the map and choose Remove from Zone (see "Turning a city or ZIP boundary into an area" below).
• Drawing, reshaping and removing an area are each one step in the history, so Ctrl+Z takes them back. If a shape cannot be saved, a message says so.
• Also enforce max distance from origin makes a hotel match only when it is inside the area and within the rule's Dist by driving distance. With it ticked, a rule with no distance matches nothing.

In Custom Polygon mode, Generate Sectors draws the areas for you: for each rule that has both a City and a Dist, a 40° wedge from the origin toward that city, reaching out to the rule's distance. A rule with several cities gets a wedge for each, joined together. It needs an origin.

• If some rules already have areas you are asked whether to overwrite them. OK replaces them; Cancel keeps them and still fills in the rules that have none.
• A summary lists what was generated and what was skipped: rules with no distance, rules with no city, existing areas that were kept, and cities that could not be found.
• The wedge's reach is measured in a straight line. Tick Also enforce max distance from origin to hold hotels to the driving distance as well.
• Nothing is assigned until you choose Apply Zoning Rules, and generating is not a step in the history.
• A city is looked up by its name alone. If a wedge points the wrong way, a town of the same name elsewhere was found: redraw that area by hand.

Turn on City Boundaries under Controls, zoom in until the dashed blue outlines appear, and click a city. Below its details, choose a zone under Select zone... and then Add to Zone: the city's outline is added to that zone's area. Tick Clip to driving distance and enter Max distance (miles) to keep only the part of the city within that drive of the origin; the button becomes Add Clipped to Zone.

A ZIP code area works the same way. Turn on ZIP Code Boundaries (Postcode Boundaries in Australia, Canada, Denmark and Ireland), zoom in until the red outlines appear, click an area and use the same Select zone..., Clip to driving distance and Add to Zone. Adding several ZIP codes to one zone builds its area piece by piece. Click anywhere on the map to close its details, another city or ZIP area included: that click only closes them, and the next one opens the area you clicked.

The side panel then opens at Zone Rules with Custom Polygon chosen, and that zone is marked in its list. That is where the area is managed: click the zone to hide or show it, or the bin beside it to delete the whole area. A zone whose area was hidden is shown again when something is added to it, so the new piece is always on the map. As with any area, hotels are not assigned until you apply the rules in Custom Polygon mode.

To take one city or ZIP area back out of a zone, click it on the map again. Under "This spot is already in:" its details list every zone whose area covers the spot you clicked, and Remove from Zone takes that city or ZIP area out of the zone, every part of it, and leaves the rest of the zone's area as it was. Where the spot is in a clipped part of a city, or in a shape drawn by hand, only that one piece is removed. Pointing at the button shows the piece in bold on the map. It is one step in the history, so Ctrl+Z puts it back. Removing a piece changes the rule, not the hotels: the ones already assigned keep their zone.

Areas, ZIP code lists and city boundaries can overlap: two wedges cross near the airport, or two zones both list Chicago. The hotel then goes to the tightest zone, the one with the smallest Dist. A rule with no distance counts as the loosest and only picks up what no other rule claimed.

• A rule's name and the size of its area play no part.
• Where overlapping rules have the same distance, or none at all (common with drawn areas), the rule higher in the table wins. Click # to see that order, and drag a rule up or down to change it.
• Distance Only has no overlaps to settle, because bands never overlap.

Choose Apply Zoning Rules. If the mode needs an origin and there is none, you are told: "Please set an origin point on the map for distance-based assignment". The run happens on the server, and a progress bar appears under the button with Pause, Resume and Cancel. A paused run carries on with the same mode and options when resumed.

• Cancel stops the run and puts every hotel's zone back as it was ("Canceling will roll back all changes"). This works from the page that started the run. If you leave and come back, the run is shown in a banner at the top of the map instead, and cancelling there keeps what was already changed.
• Only hotels with no zone yet, just above the button, limits the run to unassigned hotels. Every hotel that already has a zone is left alone, including ones zoned by hand, and nothing is measured for it. Use it after merging a newer hotel file, to zone the new hotels without undoing the edges you fixed. A hotel a colleague zones while the run is going is left alone too.
• When it finishes, the map is recoloured, Zone Statistics are refreshed, and the history gains one step such as "Applied zone rules (Distance Only) - 412 properties rezoned".
• Every hotel a distance matters to is measured from the run's origin during the run, and the new figure is stored. A hotel no road reaches from the origin matches no distance rule.
• If a colleague is already applying rules in the project, yours is refused with "Already running" and their name.

Many rate sheets are published by ZIP code, so a ZIP code split between two zones is a problem. Open ZIP Code Conflicts in the left panel and choose Check ZIP Code Conflicts. You get either "No ZIP code conflicts found" or a count, "3 conflicts found", which also appears in Map Info, with a list of the ZIP codes: each with its city, the zones its hotels are in and how many are in each, and a Select button.

To settle one by hand, choose Select: its hotels are selected on the map, and you give them a zone in the selection panel as usual. This is the careful way, and the one to use when your zones follow streets or drawn areas rather than ZIP codes.

To settle them all at once, pick a Resolution Strategy and choose Fix 3 Conflicts:

• Majority - assign to most common zone: each ZIP code goes to the zone most of its hotels are already in.
• Nearest - closest to origin: each ZIP code goes to whichever of its zones has the smallest Dist in the rule table.
• Furthest - farthest from origin: the zone with the largest Dist.

• Only zoned hotels count. A ZIP code with nine hotels in Zone 2 and one unassigned is not a conflict, and the fix never zones an unassigned hotel.
• Hotels are grouped by ZIP code and city. A ZIP code is read as five digits, so "7114" (a ZIP a spreadsheet stripped of its zero), "07114" and "07114-1234" are the same ZIP; the city is compared without regard to capitals.

When a hotel's pin lies well outside the area of its own ZIP code, one of the two is wrong, and the file alone cannot say which. GroundZones counts these hotels in an amber badge in the top bar, "12 ZIP issues". When nothing is flagged the badge is a plain ZIP check button instead. Click either to open ZIP codes.

1. Choose Check 12 addresses. It looks up exactly the hotels listed under Not checked yet, with the ZIP code deliberately left out of the question so the answer cannot simply echo it. Progress shows in place of the button ("Checking 4 / 12").
2. When it finishes, the list is sorted into three groups.
3. Work through The ZIP looks wrong: the row shows the ZIP code on file, the one the address resolved to, and the address that was matched. Choose Use 80203 to accept it, or Dismiss to leave the row as it is and take it off the list.
4. For The ZIP is right; the pin is somewhere else, there is nothing to change in the ZIP code. Find the hotel on the map and correct its pin (see Checking pins).

• If a check cannot start, or a row cannot be changed, the reason is shown at the top of the window.
• Nothing here ever moves a pin, and a ZIP code is only changed when you choose Use. Ctrl+Z reverses a Use. Dismiss cannot be reversed from the list; the row returns by itself if the hotel's ZIP code or pin later changes.
• A ZIP code that lost its leading zero in a spreadsheet is understood: the row shows "7114 -> 07114" and is compared as 07114. Your file is not rewritten.
• Not listed at all: Canadian and other non-US postal codes, ZIP codes that have no mapped area (PO boxes, single buildings), pins within 500 metres of their ZIP code's area, and hotels whose address confirmed both the ZIP code and the pin.
• In a project whose airport is outside the US there is no badge and no ZIP check: both are built on US ZIP codes, and an Italian or Australian postcode is not one, even when it has the same digits. In Australia and Canada the layer is there as Postcode Boundaries; in other countries there is no postcode layer.
• Check whole project, beside it, looks up every hotel's address in the project, including hotels that are not on the list, and skips the ones already answered. It is the only way to catch a wrong ZIP code whose pin happens to sit inside the right area.
• Large projects may need a check run more than once. Addresses the first lookup cannot settle go to a slower second service with a limit per run. The ones it did not reach stay under Not checked yet, and choosing Check N addresses again carries on with them.

The Table tab on the right edge of the map slides out a spreadsheet of every hotel, including those with no pin. The number on the tab is the number of hotels, or the number selected when there is a selection. Drag the table's left edge to resize it.

Your own columns come first, in your order and under your headers, including the ones GroundZones does not use. After them come the built-in columns your file did not have, typically Zone, Lat, Lng, Dist (mi), Status and Pin.

• Selecting exactly one row opens that hotel's popup on the map. Selecting hotels on the map scrolls the table to the first of them.
• Every edit is a step in the history. If a colleague changed the same hotel first, you see "Changed by someone else" and their version is shown.
• Dist (mi) (or Dist (km)) and Pin cannot be edited. Your own extra columns can.

The magnifying glass at the top left of the map opens "Search this area...". Type two or more characters to find a street address, a town, a ZIP code, an airport or a landmark. Up to five results appear, nearest to what you are looking at first, each with its distance from the centre of the map. Click one (or use the arrow keys and Enter) and the map flies there.

A postcode typed into the search is also looked for in your hotel file. Each postcode your hotels carry that starts with what you typed is listed first, marked "your hotels", with how many hotels carry it, such as "8 hotels on this map". Click it and the map shows all of them. This finds a postcode even where the map's place search does not know it, as in much of the Caribbean and Canada.

• These choices, and the map's position and zoom, are saved with the project within a couple of seconds, shared with your colleagues, and included in snapshots.
• Boundaries need a closer zoom than you might expect. If nothing appears after ticking ZIP Code Boundaries, zoom in.
• City outlines are drawn where GroundZones holds boundary data from OpenStreetMap. Not every town has one.
• The map itself follows the light or dark theme chosen in the top bar.

The distance range is the quickest way to sanity-check a zone: select it with its pointer icon under Zone Visibility and read off how near and how far its hotels are.

The last section of the left panel. Three tiles give Total, Assigned and Unassigned hotels, and a Coverage bar shows the share that has a zone. Below, one card per zone shows its number of hotels, the Avg, Min and Max driving distance of those hotels, and how many different ZIPs they cover. A dash means no distance has been measured in that zone yet.

• Zones are listed from the hotels, not from the rule table: a zone whose rule you deleted still appears, with a grey dot, for as long as hotels carry its name.
• The figures refresh after uploads, selection panel actions, rule runs and undo. After a single edit in a popup or a table cell they can lag until the next refresh.
• Clear All Properties, at the bottom, deletes every hotel in the project after asking. Undo does not bring them back, but a snapshot named "Before clearing all hotels" is saved first. Your zones and rules stay.

In File Management, Cities Distance List builds a spreadsheet of every city in your file with its distance from the origin: the raw material for deciding which cities belong in which zone, and what each zone's maximum distance should be. It needs hotels and an origin.

• Calculation Method: Property-based uses the distances of your own hotels in each city; City boundary-based uses the city's centre or outline from OpenStreetMap.
• Distance Type: Average Distance or Max Distance (the furthest hotel, or the furthest edge of the city).
• Add coordinates to file adds a latitude and longitude for each city.

Choose Download. The list is built on the server and downloads by itself as an Excel file with the columns City, the distance in the project's unit (miles or kilometres), and Property Count, nearest city first.

The same two actions are the Undo and Redo buttons in the top bar, beside a caption of the last step ("Last: Rezoned 12 properties to Zone 3"). The shortcuts are ignored while you are typing in a box.

A step is whatever you did in one go, however many hotels it touched: a zone change on 500 hotels is one step, and so is a rule run, a conflict fix, a delete, an import, a Geocode, Reverse or Distance run, an edit in a popup or a table cell, Pin is correct or Pins are correct on a group, Use in the ZIP list, drawing an area, Generate Sectors, and any change to a zone rule.

• History opens the list of steps, newest first. Click a step to go back to the moment just after it; everything newer is undone, and shown faded. Current State at the top returns to the newest step. Clear History empties the list without changing the map.
• A deleted hotel comes back complete, with every column of your file.
• An import can be undone but not redone: upload the file again instead.
• Undoing a rule run puts back the zones it changed and the distances it measured.
• Undoing a Geocode takes away the pin and everything the pin check said about it. Undoing Reverse or an address edit brings back the ZIP check's answer for the old address.
• A Geocode run, or a Reverse or Distance run on ten or more hotels, that changed nothing adds no step, and says "Nothing changed".
• Undoing thousands of hotels shows a progress bar in the top bar with Cancel. What has already been put back stays put back, and pressing Undo again finishes the job.
• If a colleague has changed some of those hotels since, theirs are left alone and you are told: "Some changes not undone".

Not in the history: map position, hidden zones and the other Controls choices; changing the market, and the distances measured again after it; and Dismiss in the ZIP list.

Choose Snapshots in the top bar. A snapshot holds every hotel with all its columns, every zone and rule with its drawn areas, the market and origin, and the map view with its Controls choices.

• Save one yourself before anything sweeping: type a name such as "before bulk rezone" (optional) and choose Save snapshot.
• Saved for you: when you leave the project after changing something, and a few minutes after you stop making changes even if you never leave, so a crashed browser loses little. They are listed as Auto.
• Saved before destructive actions: before a restore, before Clear All Properties ("Before clearing all hotels") and before all rules are deleted or replaced ("Before deleting all zone rules").

1. Find the snapshot in the list. Each shows its name, when it was saved, and how many hotels and rules it holds.
2. Choose Restore, then Yes, restore. The project as it is now is saved as a new snapshot first, so a restore can itself be reversed.
3. The page reloads with the restored project.

• If hotels or rules have changed since you opened the project, possibly by a colleague, you are asked before they are replaced.
• A restore waits for running work: it is refused while an upload or another job is running in the project.
• Not restored: the project's name, description and folder. The ZIP issues check starts afresh after a restore.
• A restore clears the Undo history of the tab.

• Zone rules: Download above the rule table saves a file named for the project's airport (DEN_zone_rules.xlsx) with the zone name, city, maximum distance, ZIP codes and colour. Drawn areas are not included.
• Cities Distance List: see The table, search, Controls and Map Info.
• Rules backup: when an upload replaces your zone rules, the Upload Complete screen offers Download Backup. It is only offered there.
• Row errors: when a job reports failed rows, the Jobs page offers them as a CSV.

Every plan includes up to five users, the owner included; if you need more, email support@groundzones.com and say how many. A colleague can be given view-only access to the workspace or to a single project. They see the map, can select hotels, open popups, sort and filter the table, use Controls and export the file. Everything that changes the project is hidden: upload, rules, the selection panel, Undo and Snapshots. The left panel says so at the top: "You have view-only access."

Nothing is pushed live between browsers: you see a colleague's changes when your map next reloads its data, which happens after your own actions and when you reload the page. What GroundZones does guarantee is that nobody's work is overwritten silently.

Imports, rule runs, the ZIP check, the cities list, every Geocode run and large Reverse and Distance runs happen on the server. You can keep the page open and watch the progress bar, or leave: the work carries on either way.

• When you open a map where work is still running, yours or a colleague's, a banner at the top of the map names it ("Applying zone rules is running (started by ...)") with its progress, and the map reloads when it finishes.
• On your own jobs the banner has pause, resume and cancel buttons. Cancelling from the banner keeps what the job has already changed; only a cancel from the page that started the job rolls it back.
• While an upload in Replace all properties mode runs, an amber strip says the map is view-only until it finishes, for everyone. Whoever started it can pause, resume or cancel it from the banner.
• The Jobs page in the top bar lists finished and running jobs with their results, and has Pause, Resume and Cancel for any job still running in your workspace. Cancelling there keeps what the job has already changed.
• A workspace runs two jobs at a time. A third waits its turn, marked WAITING on the Jobs page and "waiting for other jobs" under its progress bar, and starts on its own when one of the two finishes. You can pause or cancel it while it waits.

The 14-day trial starts when you open your first airport, not when you sign up, and includes every feature described here. In its last three days a banner counts the days down. If it ends without a plan, your work is kept and becomes read-only: you can open every project, look around and export. The map hides its editing controls and says why, and editing returns the moment you choose a plan.

On a Mac, Cmd works wherever Ctrl is listed.