What should I know about tourism merchant category codes?

Merchant category codes (MCC) are used to classify a business by the types of goods or services it provides. Learn how MCCs are used in your ZDOS®.

Spending Data:  

Our credit card data is collected from more than 3,000 financial institutions. Each business is categorized by the types of goods or services it provides. Our goal is to provide the clearest view of the visitor economy, so we take several key steps in processing the data to ensure we bring the cleanest signal into our OS and analyses.

Tourism MCC Categories: One step is to remove spending from Merchant Category Codes (MCC) categories that are not commonly associated with visitor spending, which could include unmarked online or mail-order activities. These include professional services, banking, printing, and commercial services and many others. This also includes a filter to remove all of the MCC codes associated with airline travel. This was done to prevent online, or phone-based reservations from being attributed back to the airline’s corporate headquarters (e.g. United Airlines in Chicago). Of the 982 MCC codes used by the industry, we filter out more than 500 categories for a clearer visitor signal.

How do MCCs help within the ZDOS®?

Merchant Credit Codes can provide various interesting and valuable data on the type of spending habits visitors have within your destination. MCC codes we use help you answer questions such as "What type of spending is included in x category?" or "Why is there a crazy amount of spend going to one industry (or one community) within my destination?".

Here is a list of the Merchant Credit Categories with descriptions... 

Categories used in our tourism signal: