Resort Marketing

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Labor Day is the Unofficial Start to…

September 8th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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StartI’ll finish that title, Labor Day is the unofficial start to…the ski resort marketing season.

In the years I’ve worked in ski resort marketing I’ve often wondered a bit about why we started each winter’s marketing cycle when we did. Much of it has been related to the timing of the ski vertical publications – anyone checked circulation numbers lately? Much has also been related to traditional lead times of vacation rental bookings – anyone seen how short lead times have gotten over the past several years? A lot of timing has also been tied to the idea that Labor Day weekend is the “traditional end of summer” and that if a resort is first to market that they may seem some sort of bump in brand awareness and hopefully business over the coming season. Does any of this still hold true, and when is the ideal time for resorts to start their marketing as well as PR efforts?

Certain things like mountain improvement announcements are usually announced earlier in the summer. This is then followed by special package deals for select time frames around Labor Day Weekend. Season pass sales typically are pushed anywhere from mid-summer up through Labor Day weekend. And you can count on a big blitz of PR and marketing as soon as the first major snow storms pass blanket the mountain tops.

I think that the best time for each resort to start their marketing efforts is different, depending upon who their target audience is and therefore upon when their target audience begins to think about their winter plans. I also think that it’s integral in today’s integrated marketing environment to continually test to see if what you thought was the right time might be wrong and vice versa – see my post on testing for more.

This is also topic that we will discuss on #mrktchat tomorrow, so please stop by on Twitter at 3pm MST and tell us what you think Labor Day weekend is the unofficial start of – or just let us know in the comments on this post.

Photo credit: Flickr user iwouldstay

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Must Read Presentation Tips

September 6th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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I don’t give a lot of presentations but for the next one that I do I will be sure to incorporate the tips and ideas in this very well constructed SlideShare deck from Jesse Desjardins (hat tip to Graham Robertson for posting), and yes I “Stole it” because I want to create a compelling and fun to follow presentation like it:

STEAL THIS PRESENTATION!
View more presentations from @JESSEDEE.

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Google Trends Ski Searches

September 3rd, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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Google offers up such a wide array of amazing tools and applications that some of their coolest items sometimes can be overlooked. One of my favorite tools, that I don’t use often enough, is Google Trends. What this tools does is allow you to see what Google’s users are searching for over time and by region. What does that mean, well, I want to see when searches for “Ski Vacation” start to trend up – I search and this nice chart comes up:

Ski Resort Search Trend Chart

Pretty slick eh, and it shows how the fourth and first quarter of the year look like ski jumps up and down to a point just before the end of the calendar year. Another neat component to this chart is the smaller graph on the bottom showing news reference volume – how often “ski vacation” appeared in news stories indexed by Google. It doesn’t show the trend I would expect of stories appearing slightly before the ski season.

Another nifty function is the ability to compare multiple terms (separate them using commas in the search box) at the same time. I decided to compare a couple of Vermont resorts over the past year and got these results:

Scale is based on the average traffic of stowe from United States in the last 12 months.
stowe 1.00, killington 0.50, sugarbush 0.18, okemo 0.25

Vermont Resort Trend Comparison

I think this chart shows both the positive and shortcomings of this service. First, isn’t it awesome how you can compare brand specific keyword searches on the biggest search engine? On the other hand, simple comparisons like this can expose issues, like how I’ve managed to capture a bunch of town of Stowe related searches in this comparison, while the others are more centric to resorts. This isn’t something that can’t be overcome, but you need to be cognizant of other potential reasons people might be searching for our terms before reading too much into results.

One last really useful trick to use with Google Trends is to switch from comparing searches to comparing websites, this is a bit more difficult in the ski resort business as there aren’t many resort website with enough traffic to appear consistently in these results, but I highly recommend keeping this as well as the other trend related searches in your bag of tricks

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Doing a Little “Mixing”

September 1st, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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Vail Resorts cranked up their well-oiled PR machine to help them “launch”, well, start promoting  an interesting social media product that they’re calling EpicMix. On first impression it sounds like it will be the on-slope version of FourSquare or Gowalla, this is particularly true when watching the Epic Mix promo video with it’s depiction of a trail map showing exactly where your friend are and where you’ve been:

Digging a little deeper, VR reveals that they’ve done some serious work in bringing their RFID pass scanning technology to the real-time web as a way to bypass some of the issues that Ski Resort have with LBS (Location Based Service). Namely:

  • The lack of consistent cell service
  • The difficulty of using mobile device GPSs
  • The trouble of battery drain with electronic devices in cold weather.
  • The fact that only a certain number of consumer will have smart phones with GPS technology with them.

Of course, RFID cards have been in use for Track Your Turn type services by many resorts for quite some time now, see:

What Vail has done is make their database accessible in a more real-time environment via web and mobile interfaces along with giving users the ability to share their “on-mountain” information very readily to social networks. They’ve also taken the “gaming” component of the major Geo-location services and added “several hundred” badges to be collected by users.

A big component that isn’t available via RFID, or at least how Vail appears to have setup their system is knowing exactly what run a customer has traversed, at what speed and if they’ve gotten lost and are stuck on the mountain – unless of course the customer is stuck at the base of a lift, because that, at least from the sound of it, it the only place that a customer is physically scanned. Once a customer is scanned at the base of a particular lift, it’s simple to calculate that they’ll reach top of that lift and then have X number of options to ski or ride to any other lift – of course you could ride to the base and off the mountain, but unless you make sure to check in somewhere or walk off through some sort of scanner, the system will have to assume that you wound up at the same base that you originally started at. Just a bit of conjecture, but it does show some of the limitations of just using RFID.

I imagine that VR could face some of the challenges that many LBS companies are working through, which is the fact that many people, probably a lot of the higher worth folks that spend the most money on ski vacations, don’t like sharing their location. Perhaps they’ll enjoy tracking their vertical on their own, but I do wonder if this app can move past the “geek love” stage and into a place where it’s able to demonstrably show ROI? That said, I’m a “geek” and very happy to see a large resort operator with resources like VR’s making a strong commitment to developing socially centric and unique to ski resort applications – kudos!

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Ski Area “Sting” Down Under

August 30th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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Snowy MountainsThe “ski bum” culture has always had close ties to illicit substance, but a recent news report from Australia put this connection back to the forefront. There was a drug ring bust in Australia’s Snowy Mountains last week and of the ten people arrested, six of them worked seasonal in the “ski fields”. I don’t know if this is a huge score in terms of drug busts or not, but I do think that it only emphasizes the fact that there can still be a perception that skiing and snowboarding are linked to substance culture.

Resorts can only have some much influence what their guests do. The opposite is true of their employees and the resorts I have knowledge of are very conscious about HR policies in this regard and, at least in my opinion, have really done a fine job of separating the element of drug culture that there is in resort towns, from the resort workforce. I’m sure the Australian resorts where this bust happened have controls in place, but should and how could they react to show that they have taken measures to try to prevent people involved in theses sorts of things from gaining employment at their resorts?

Photo credit: Flickr user Aschaf (hmm, are those clouds, or….?)

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Are you ready?

August 27th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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It’s been a busy week at the office. Our team got a brand new eStore up and running with a brand new mix of season pass products, we’re in the midst of any number of other projects and oh yeah, my daughter is getting ready to start pre-school next week, whew! With all that’s going on it’s always good to take a big step back and look at the big picture, this is what we’re going to be doing in under three months:

Snowboarding in Utah powder

Makes the long hours of late summer seem not so bad…I can’t wait how about you?!

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Second Home Market Rebounding?

August 25th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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A Mountain Vacation HomeWith on-going chatter about the possibility of a double-dip recession it was interesting to read an article in USA Today about the growth of the second home market in family-friendly resorts. The article puts ski resorts together with golf and private-club communities, but here’s what it notes about ski resorts:

Ski resorts. Some resorts focus more on family activities than others. Among the most popular amenities is a slope-side “village center” that offers skating, dining, rentals, ski school and kids’ club in one convenient location. Beaver Creek, Colo.; Whistler, British Columbia, Canada; Northstar, Calif.; Stowe, Vt.; and several other resorts have them. Beaver Creek’s elaborate system of escalators in its village is frequently cited by parents of ski-boot-wearing children as their favorite feature. Beaver Creek and Colorado’s Snowmass, with its huge “Kids’ Treehouse,” were ranked in the top five family-friendly resorts by Ski Magazine. Beaver Creek is one of the priciest areas. Snowmass offerings start at $500,000-plus and run into seven figures. More-affordable options: California’s Northstar-at-Tahoe ski resort has a new village center with ice rink and “Mommy, Daddy and Me” ski school packages. Condos in the Village at Northstar start just under $300,000.

Are family-centric offerings key to a successful ski resort, or are they just one more pricey gimmick that may lure in a few people but isn’t truly a way to build a long term and sustainable business?

Photo credit: Flickr user dhgoodman

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Interesting “Job” Postings

August 23rd, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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It seems like just yesterday that the social media world was all aflutter over Tourism Queenslands “Best Job in the World” campaign (including me, check out my post about it from January 2009). I’ve since seen campaigns offering dream jobs ranging from “working” for a vineyard to “tweeting” for MTV and even traveling to Colorado to see snow for the first time (interestingly the SwowAtFirstSite.com page has been completely removed already). In a fit of inspiration I thought I’d do a quick survey of how the winners are doing by using a few Twitter ratings (I’m using the accounts promoted by the companies including the Murphy Goode account in which the “job” is already over):

Name Company/Promotion Followers Tweetlevel Compensation
Ben Southall Tourism Queensland/Best Job in the World 4,033 55 $150k AUD/6 months

($133,800 US)
Gabi Gregg MTV/MTV TJ 13,760 74 $100k/yr
Hardy Wallace Murphy Goode/A Really Goode Job 2,563 44 $60k plus costs/6 months

I know that these people are doing a lot more that Tweeting, but I find it interesting to see, at least on one social network, a rudimentary gauge of reach (followers) and a self-described gauge of influence (Tweetlevel). Only in the case of MTV does it seem as though the person is really making inroads, at least on Twitter.

This fairly meager success hasn’t slowed companies from trying to leverage social mediaites by offering “jobs” or opportunities to be a “blogger”. Here’s a quick rundown of a few options:

Company Promotion Requirement Compensation
SkiUtah.com Be a Powderhound blogger 1-2 blog posts/wk over the 2010-11 winter season A SkiUtah! Silver Passport, $,2400 value
Vail Resorts Snow Squad Share the “Stoke” Epic Pass, smart phone and approx. $3k in gear
Canyons how do you mountain 3-4 blog posts/wk over 4 months $40k + lodging at Waldorf Astoria*, F&B allowance, spa treatments, pass and more
*I did a quick check on a suite at the WA and at $500/nt that’s over $60k just in lodging!

What does this mean? I’m not sure, perhaps these sorts of contests are really successful and more companies are following suit because of the success? Or are companies not completely sure of what direction they should take in the social space and these sorts of promotions are relatively easy to create and manage? Or, is it a something else? If you have an opinion please share it in the comments section below – I look forward to hearing your ideas!

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Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Urbanspoon

August 20th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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This is another post in a continuing series on Social Networks for Ski Resorts, check out the ever evolving list here.

I would bet that there are a lot of people that wouldn’t be thinking of Urbanspoon when they think about social networks – I would also bet that those people are not in the restaurant business. With their iPhone, Android and widget (see below):

Urbanspoon has set the bar for apps that allow users to choose where to eat based upon their location and some fun user selectable, or completely random options. BTW, the widget doesn’t allow for settings outside most major metropolitan areas, so you’ll need to select Park City and lock it in the first column to see the options for here.

If you haven’t used Urbanspoon, it is a fun way way to choose dining options, even where you live, but even better when you’re travelling. It’s ability to select a restaurant and then see reviews is unique and this is what, in my mind makes it appealing to ski resorts that wish to add another dimension to how they market their food and beverage options online. Particularly once a visitors is leaving the mountain, they are no longer captive to the food choices at the on-mountain restaurants, so why not ensure that your restaurant is listed in Urbanspoon?!

In terms of ski resorts, I’m not sure of any that have made a concerted effort to get their dining properties listed on Urbanspoon, if you know of any, please let us know in the comments!

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What can Ski Resorts Learn from Professional Sports about Social Media?

August 18th, 2010 by Eric Hoffman
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AP TweetingA year ago I wrote a post talking about how my favorite NFL team, the Minnesota Vikings, was then using social media. A year later, I would argue that every major and most minor sports teams are fully immersed in social media and are enjoying the benefits (and hazards) of engaging their fan base directly online. While teams can manage the engagement on their own sites and social connections, they don’t have as much control over the athletes on their teams and are looking at ways to ensure that their players are also engaging in social media with appropriate care. As the football season starts to wind up, it seems that a few football players are already posting some, uh “questionable” things, and organizations are scrambling to react – there’s a very nice description of this in an article on ESPN.com titled, “Football tweeters in midseason form” which sets forth the following advice:

As Dolphins cornerback Vontae Davis, whose grandmother is one of his Twitter followers, told the Sun-Sentinel: “I’m not going to put anything on there that my grandmother won’t want to see.”

This certainly is just another reason for ski resorts to ensure that they’re putting together appropriate guidelines and resources for their employees, because this winter will only see more people posting to social media from their workplace on the mountain, whether it’s playing in powder, people dangling from lifts, getting caught up on them or nearly getting blown off of them.

8/18/10 edit – Just wanted to note that I wrote this post last weekend, well before the recent Brett Favre “un-retirement”.
Photo credit: Flickr user xoque and modified via CC2.0 Attribution

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