accesso sponsored content

How to improve guest experiences, increase revenue, and stress less in 2022

By Phil Schwartz

As ski areas grapple with an ever-changing business landscape, it’s important to keep a close eye on consumer trends. In a world of Instacart and Amazon, guests have become accustomed to seamless online transactions that put the world at their fingertips—and they bring these same expectations to your resort. 

Whether that means buying everything for their visit ahead of time, picking tickets up at a kiosk, or pre-ordering food from their phone on the chairlift, there is a big shift happening in terms of how guests buy and make redemptions. And the ability to make friction-free transactions possible relies heavily on the effectiveness of your e-commerce. 

To fully capitalize on this trend, it’s important to ensure that your e-commerce environment is setting you and your guests up for success. Here, we offer six tips that will help you improve guest experiences, increase revenue, and stress less in 2022. 

1. Make it Easy for Guests to Buy Online

Resort products can be complicated, requiring guest information like height, weight, ability levels, allergies, emergency contacts, birthdays, and more. It’s critical to offer an engaging, smooth, and intuitive purchase process so guests don’t get frustrated and abandon their purchase. 

To accomplish this, your e-commerce store must be flexible, with uniquely crafted purchase flows for each product to ensure easy redemption. Should a single-day lift ticket or gift card require a guest to create a profile and login? Probably not. Can you look for ways to streamline season pass purchases for a five-person family, who will all need to have photos and liability waivers on file? Absolutely.

2. Create a One-Stop Online Shop

When you showcase all your resort offerings in a single, easy-to-navigate storefront, you can not only drive revenue, but also make things easy for your guests. Avoid creating a scenario where guests need to make several transactions to pre-purchase tickets, lessons, and rentals, which is sure to leave guests frustrated and leave money on the table for your resort. Make it easy for guests to build out their full experience at your ski area—whether that’s a single day, a week, or a full season!

Pre-selling online gives you the ability to better forecast visitation and staffing needs, so much so that you might want to consider offering pricing incentives for guests who buy in advance. Plus, preselling tickets can help your ski area minimize variables – such as bad weather – that can hurt last-minute skier counts. Meanwhile, guests can ensure that your resort has ample lesson capacity and enough equipment for their rental needs.   

3. Guide the Purchasing Journey with Upsells

Over the past decade, we’ve seen e-commerce transition from a complementary part of resort business to the main source of transactions for many operators. As you consider ways to continue growing e-commerce revenue, some of the most effective tools you can use are upsells and cross-sells. Many of the giants in online retail attribute billions of their revenue to these techniques. Upsells and cross-sells also help your guests, as they become more aware of potential savings with packaging and discover new offerings they didn’t know you had. 

Some ideas include upselling to multi-day tickets from single-day, or beginner packages from a single-day lesson. Preferred parking add-ons, food and beverage vouchers, helmet rental additions, and pass protection are some other opportunities to consider. Even small, incremental additions can have a significant impact on your bottom line at the end of the season.

4. Create More Self-Service Opportunities

Creating more self-serve options for guests can provide huge benefits to your business’s operations while boosting guest satisfaction. Keeping skiers and snowboarders out of lines and on the mountain gives them a better experience, making them more likely to return. It also means you might not need all those physical ticket windows you used to have, which are becoming harder and harder to staff. 

Eliminating unnecessary in-person transactions has never been easier. For example, our accesso Passport^® online ticketing system is equipped with a portal that allows guests to redeem entitlements tied to a ski area’s season pass program. It also empowers guests to manage, redeem and schedule multi-day packages, with no need for staff assistance. Passholders no longer need to come to a window to redeem buddy tickets, or take advantage of discounted lesson or rentals.  With our integration with ID.ME, guests can also take advantage of military, first responder, and other discounts that typically need to be validated in person.

5. Keep the Mobile Experience Top of Mind

With nearly 73 percent of e-commerce transactions occurring on mobile phones, creating a great mobile experience should be top of mind for your resort. Most guests who visit your store will do so at one point from their phone or tablet. That’s why, at accesso®, we design our stores with the mobile experience in mind first, and why we support mobile payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay to make it easier for guests to complete their purchases on the go. 

Your mobile experience can also extend beyond your e-commerce store. Offering guests the ability to pre-purchase food while out on the mountain is another terrific way to keep them happy and out of line.

6. Feel Confident in Your Online Store’s Reliability

Growing your online sales and making things easier for guests are both key, but we can’t ignore the importance of making sure your online store is secure and reliable. As more aspects of your resort are “connected” than ever before—even snowmaking can now be done digitally!—it’s critical that resort and guest data is secure.

Beyond security, an online store needs to be capable of handling increases in traffic. Slow page responsiveness and load times can kill a potential sale. With the accesso Passport e-commerce ticketing solution, you can feel confident that much of the technical burden is taken off your team’s plate. Working with a partner that has a dedicated security team, having your store hosted with AWS, and using a payment gateway capable of handling billions of dollars in transactions per year all contribute to easing the burden on your team and optimizing your e-commerce.

Phil Schwartz has served as a sales director for accesso® for six years. Residing in the Lake Tahoe area since 2011, Phil got his start in the ski industry working within a number of different roles for what is still his “home resort,” Sierra at Tahoe. At accesso, Phil focuses on helping ski area operators leverage technology designed to improve their operations, grow their business revenue and ensure a great guest experience. In his free time, he is an avid resort and backcountry snowboarder. 

At accesso, we believe the best way to predict the future is to create it. To explore how we can help you plan for a successful future for your ski area, serve guests better and increase sales in 2022, contact us here, or visit our Ski Area Management Tech Mountain Guide page here.