Last spring, SAM tossed that question to some of the most savvy folks on the receiving end of all the ones and zeros. Their answer: only so-so.
Our respondents are subscribers of SkiVt-L, a skiing-oriented listserv hosted by the University of Vermont. (Listservs are a system in which an e-mail from one subscriber is automatically re-broadcast to all subscribers. They’re one of the earliest forms of online mass communications.) SkiVt-L is one of the oldest skiing forums on the Web, created in 1988.
Today, SkiVt-L has hundreds of subscribers who live across North America and ski all over the world. Subscriber ages range from high school to septuagenarians, and their insights into current efforts of resort marketing departments are instructive. Responses almost invariably boiled down to three key concepts:
- Make it easy for me to get the information I want.
- Don’t try to oversell me.
- Don’t waste my time.
Websites
While resort websites are often the first impression given to a prospective customer, they also help regular customers make go/no-go decisions. Make sure your website serves both purposes.
Serving users well starts with navigation. Visitors to your site generally have a pretty good idea of what they want to learn. Impede their search in any way and you’ll annoy them.
“Websites should be clean, uncluttered and easy-to-search sources of info,” said Ridgeville, Ontario, native Leigh Daboll, 43. “When I go to a site, I’m looking for specific things.”
Our respondents liked visually appealing sites, but not at the expense of lengthy download time. “Resort websites should not drive heavy graphics to users with dial-up modems,” said 37-year-old Vermont native Carlos Albuerne of Winhall. Albuerne suggests that resorts create dual-channel websites that deliver simpler graphic content to dial-up users.
In that regard, several respondents praised Mad River Glen’s website. Much like the ski area, the site isn’t flashy and dishes up the goods in a straightforward, take-it-or-leave-it manner. It loads quickly from a dial-up. “Attributes I dig,” said 29-year-old Somerville, Massachusetts, skier Lars Bruns, “include the live cam, the updated snow and weather summary and a short description of the events—all on the home page. And the interactive trail map with commentary is cool.”
Respondents clearly preferred sites that are kept fresh, and many felt that resorts don’t update their sites often enough. Respondents wanted more frequent snow and trail status reports, particularly during weather events. Eric Morton, 35, lives in Austin, Texas and “much prefers sites that regularly update their pic-of-the-day.”
Personality helps, too. Scott Braaten, 18 years old and a resident of Delmar, New York, likes Steamboat’s site “because of their Straight Talk Ski Report. The best websites are the ones where a personality writes up a few paragraphs on current conditions and experiences out on the hill. Even if it isn’t always the truth—ski areas are not going to tell you not to come because the snow isn’t that great—nothing gets me in the mood to ski like a great ski report.”
Braaten also likes Killington’s ski report section “because you can count on it being updated by 6:30 in the morning. Some other resorts—Mount Snow, Sugarbush and Jiminy Peak come to mind—don’t post early enough to catch me before I’m in the car.”
Pet Peeves
Several responders described pet peeves. Albuerne pointed out that “useful and repeatedly visited links should not expire.” He also counsels resorts to make sure that someone’s paying attention to inbound e-mail generated from the website—all year long. He has waited more than a week for responses from several ski areas he’d e-mailed through their “contact us” links.
Don’t hide the deals, either. Daboll is so skilled a tightwad that his bargain-hunting tactics have been featured in Ski Magazine—but he’d rather be able to find the deals easily. “Specials and ticket prices should be easy for everyone to find, not just the select few,” he says. “I often drive seven hours to Vermont simply because I know that a certain weekend will be ‘Take Your Daughter Day’ or some other bargain. Resorts should stop worrying about the loss of gross ticket revenue and start realizing that it’s the only reason I’m there in the first place.”
Other tips from end users: make specific pages easy to bookmark (on some resort websites, this is impossible), avoid pop-up and pop-under ads, and provide links to weather sources and local inns, restaurants and services. Sites that allowed users to customize their view to get precisely the information they sought drew high marks. And several respondents pooh-poohed online trail maps for being unreadable.
Finally, make sure that obsolete information is deleted from your host servers. Search engines can still turn up old material, even if it’s no longer linked from your active pages.
E-Mail Newsletters
Wouldn’t it be great if consumers actually asked for your advertisements? That’s the idea behind—and the promise of—e-mail snow reports and newsletters. Handled properly, they drive sales. But handled clumsily, they alienate your most loyal customers.
Our respondents liked resorts that send out e-mail snow alerts any time significant snow falls. Morton pointed to Jiminy Peak as a resort that “does a pretty good job with push communication… there’s incentive to subscribe because they give you information on deals. They also don’t give you too much information—I hate the ones that write you excessively with what’s basically the snow report.”
Albuerne takes it a step further: “Resorts should distinguish between daily snow reports and other types of reports,” he said. “If I sign up for a newsletter, I shouldn’t get one every day. I resent the heavy-handed marketing.” Albuerne praised Bromley’s newsletter, sent after big snow or other significant weather events. “Twice this winter, they advised us of very cold temps and high winds,” he said. “That’s great information for someone packing for a trip.” Albuerne added that resort newsletters and reports should be available in both .html and text-only formats.
The Drift Gets It
Several respondents had good things to say about Killington’s “The Drift,” a breezy, informative weekly produced by Killington communications chief Steve Wright. The Drift has a circulation that tops 150,00 after two years of existence. “It’s starting to level off,” said Wright. “I think we’re starting to reach saturation.” Still, 150,000 loyal subscribers isn’t bad.
The tone of The Drift is flip and irreverent. No item is longer than a paragraph—and each includes a link directly to a relevant section of Killington’s website so subscribers can learn more about the subject or deal. Wright keeps things moving with weekly trivia contests—he typically gets several thousand entries a week—and by asking subscribers’ opinions on a range of subjects. He makes sure that people know their comments are appreciated by recapping results in subsequent issues and e-mailing a quick, personalized thank-you note back to about 75 Drift subscribers each week.
It’s a lot of work—“it’s absolutely my top priority on Wednesdays and Thursdays,” Wright said—but it definitely helps drive sales and improve services. “People buy the specials,” Wright said. “And we use it for market research—for example, we once asked people what we could add to packages to make them more appealing. Many said ‘free food,’ so we packaged meal plans into some of the deals, and they sold very well.”
Not all resort newsletters fared so well in the eyes of our respondents. Forty-five-year-old Neal Slatin of Huntington, New York, forwarded an overwrought Super Bowl-oriented epistle from Hunter Mountain and described it as “about the ugliest e-mail ever from a mountain…. I got a headache trying to read it.” With no paragraph breaks and a sea of words, we saw his point.
Good newsletters, in the view of our respondents, are quick, fun reads that are informative and subtle in their sell. They arrive like clockwork, give people a reason to keep their subscriptions going, and make it easy for subscribers to cancel.
Resorts that don’t allow easy cancellation earned wrath. “More than a few resorts use telescopic lenses to shoot themselves in the foot,” said Dan Barron, a 49-year-old New York City resident. “I’ve successfully disconnected from some, but others I still endure, each missive adding one more reason to ski somewhere else.”
Executed well, resort e-marketing mechanisms clearly have the capability to drive sales and attract customers, all at a comparatively low cost. Still, these programs can’t replace traditional marketing efforts. “Print brochures still have a place alongside electronic media, particularly in the ‘Wow Factor,’” said Daboll. “As in ‘wow, this place looks so beautiful, I’ve got to go there.’ That’s something electronic media simply can’t duplicate well.”
