Park City president and GM Peter Curtis was doing one of the things he loves most (off the snow that is): riding along a breathtaking mountain pass on his beloved motorcycle.

Only problem was, he was too anxious to take in any of the magnificence all around him. “I was lost. And for 50 miles, all I was focused on was, ‘where am I? Am I going the right way?’ When it was all over, I realized I didn’t see a thing.”

Earlier that year, in the winter, web guru Shon Taylor, a principal at BottleRocket Manufacturing, a company that creates innovative web tools for businesses, was skiing at Park City. “I’m an intermediate skier and Park City (like many mountains) can be a confusing place to be. There are lots of falllines and different routes. At my level there are places on the mountain I might not want to end up. So to be safe, I end up skiing the same route over and over,” he says. “I had a small comfort zone.”

From those two experiences came an innovation—Park City’s new online My Mountain Planner tool. This web-based tour guide helps a visitor plan out different routes to take at Park City, right from the comfort of their laptop or desktop.


Tooling Around
The tool, launched this past season, proved successful beyond the resort’s expectations. It didn’t just put skiers and riders at ease, but spread the traffic flow out to sections of the mountain that once stood almost deserted. Prominently placed on the home page at www.park­citymountain.com, the tool allows a skier or rider, before heading to Park City, to choose not only trail preferences (greens and blues? blues and blacks? all blacks? no bumps? groomed or ungroomed? a combination?) but also what type of mood they want to ski that day: mellow or aggressive.

A visitor clicks on, makes preferences, and then hits a key. Up pops an entire day’s plan, from runs and lifts to take to when to break for lunch or a snack, and where. The idea, says Curtis, is to give guests a new comfort level as to where they are and where they are heading on the mountain, thus freeing them up to take in the world around them—unlike his experience on that mountain pass on his bike.

“Any ski resort, no matter how many trails they have and how many lifts they have, at the end of the day for the customer, it’s about going to the hill,” he says. “It’s about skiing and riding and taking in all that is around you. This place is amazing; so visual and beautiful. And I know from experience, sometimes skiers can miss some of that from worrying how to get around. Face it, almost any time you approach a skier looking at a trail map they say, ‘where am I anyway?’ We wanted to solve that.”


Planning the Planner
Curtis took his thoughts to the marketing department and to BottleRocket, which works closely with the resort on many projects. “I told them I wanted to change things,” Curtis says. “We had a situation where skiers come here and ski 10, maybe 15 percent of the mountain, when in fact they have the ability to ski, in most cases, 80 percent of it or more. We needed to make that happen.”

From that came the idea to help skiers plan a full day online, tweak it until they like it or choose a variety of plans for different days, print it out and take it along. “We knew it had to be user-friendly and at the same time, use more of the mountain,” says Curtis.

Taylor says the most difficult part of the process was looping it all into something manageable—getting the Park City execs to decide what kind of variables to set. “I knew this was important. They had to have a great variety yet be manageable. In the end, the success of this project would be: does it deliver? It took a lot of thinking to get to that point.”

But they did. While the think tank started with over 20,000 tours, thanks to the number of variables they wanted to put in, they realized that would be too confusing to the potential user. So they honed it down to 44 diverse tours, all created by users making choices from their computer.


Exceeding Expectations
They put it out there quietly this past November. It hit big. By December, the resort was tracking 10 percent of its skiers logging onto the program and creating tours. By April, the site recorded more than 100,000 page views, nearly all of which ended with the visitor creating a map.

Best yet, Park City staffers see the maps out on the mountain. “People pull them out and show our hosts all the time,” says Curtis. And, they’re experiencing more traffic on parts of the mountain that once went almost deserted. “We feel the tours are sending people there. People are seeing more of Park City and not getting stressed about doing it. We consider this a success. We look for purple cows in this business and this is definitely one of them.”

Curtis notes that the resort has realized a success beyond the slopes, too. Riding and skiing there, he says, is now a three-phase experience. First, the visitor sits down at his desk and logs on to create a plan. He thinks about what mood he’ll be in; what kind of terrain he’ll want to find. He hits print and his connection with Park City has begun. Phase two is the actual visit, which, Curtis believes, is more fulfilling with a plan. “Lift tickets are expensive. Value is not price-driven but experience-driven. The best thing you want to hear in the parking lot is, ‘I’m exhausted. I need a hot tub and some wine before going out to dinner.’ We are hearing that more.”

The third part comes after the trip, he says. “When I go somewhere, often afterward I don’t really know exactly where I was on the mountain. With this, you go home with a memory that is real. You have been part of the mountain and you can look at your tour and remember it.”

Park City plans to expand its tour selection next season, particularly for green and lower blue skiers, since they had a larger response to the program from these groups than it expected.

Curtis and Taylor visualize a day when certain tours become bragging rights. “It’s one thing to go back to your New York stock office and say, ‘I skied 23 miles in one day,’ ” says resort spokeswoman Krista Rowles Parry. “Now they can go back and say, ‘Here’s what I skied.’ ”

Curtis sums it up this way: “It’s meaningful, it’s real, and it works. What more can you ask for?”

The Guest Editor’s Take

This sounds like a great program for the planning set. Creating a program that allows guests to plan their day and tour the whole mountain can make for a richer experience. I hope this encourages guests to become more imaginative in the way they explore our mountains. Many of our guests have lost their sense of adventure. We spend so much time planning every aspect of our lives; I still hold hope that our vacations serve up some spontaneity and adventure. I remember skiing in St. Anton and getting lost and skiing upon the quaint village of Lech where we had a memorable lunch with friends. It was a magical moment of exploration and discovery I will never forget. I only hope our guests don’t lose that sense of exploration and adventure and end up touring our resorts like lines of lemmings.

—Greg Murtha