For the most part, ski area Websites are stagnant—mere online brochures when they should be so much more. Resorts are not availing themselves of the technology that is here today; technology that can and should captivate users.
With more than 75 percent of skiers and snowboarders now online, the opportunity exists for the industry to shine, to reach out and engage its best customers, as well as to attract new business and new adherents to snow sports.
What are ski resorts failing to do? It doesn’t take much Web surfing to see how other lifestyle industries are leveraging the Internet. You can click on a music site and play sound bites from the latest albums. You can see sneak previews of new movies in streaming video that downloads in seconds. You can take an aerial tour of Pebble Beach golf course and listen to a pro’s instructions on how to play each hole. You can visit Microsoft’s Expedia and cruise the canals of Venice with a 360-degree panoramic virtual reality tour, complete with Italian music.
You can even track the progress of that overdue UPS package. My conversion to the wonders of the Web was complete a few weeks ago when I called up the UPS site to see why I had not received an important package. I quickly found the electronic record, with a date, delivery time and the notation, “Left on side of house.” Chagrined, I checked our side entrance next to the driveway—and there it was.
All of this is not exotica reserved for a handful of super-Net surfers; these are functions that, in most cases, come bundled with the existing software on your PC or Mac. Even with older operating systems, you can usually download players to get fast-loading video, virtual reality and audio. This stuff is now mainstream. The problem is that what is simple for any 14-year-old kid might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics to most CEOs. A couple of years ago, the Wall Street Journal published a report suggesting that three-fourths of the company presidents and CEOs in America were not sufficiently computer-literate to operate a PC. I’m not sure that much has changed since then.
Most ski resorts haven’t seen the big picture, yet. At one end of the spectrum, they cut corners by hiring HTML hobbyists in exchange for a season pass. At the other end, they splurge on an 800-pound gorilla such as IBM (if Big Blue can’t do it, who can?) or a Madison Avenue ad agency. Both types of strategies have inherent problems and both have already yielded mediocre results. I know of resorts that have spent $5,000 and achieved passable results and resorts that spent $250,000 and got a whole lot less than state-of-the-art.
Everything that used to be possible on a CD ROM is now possible on the Web, and with quick downloading even on creaky 28.8 baud modems. But when was the last time you saw audio, video or virtual reality on a ski resort site? (You will this season. Check out Snowbird’s new site at www.snowbird.com.)
Recently, I looked at an Eastern resort site that bragged about its new virtual reality photos and streaming video. With a 56k modem, it took me 7 minutes to download a 15-second video and about four minutes to download the virtual reality photos, which were so muddy they weren’t worth the wait anyway. Much better technology already exists to greatly speed up those features, but the resort obviously hadn’t tapped into it.
Here is what I should be seeing when I click on to the top ski resorts in the country: An aerial tour of the mountain, done from the point of view of the skier. You know that video arcade skiing game that’s so popular with kids? You can do almost the same thing online. And you don’t need to rely on an expensive manned helicopter to get those shots, either. There are companies in L.A. that can supply remote-controlled miniature helicopters with video cameras. The handiwork of these nifty little machines appears constantly in TV commercials and in movies. One was used for shots in the sci-fi epic, “Starship Troopers.” Surprisingly, renting one of these things with a crew costs well under $10,000 for an entire day.
I should be able to click on a trail map and get an audiovideo presentation on the resort’s premier ski runs with the ski school director or a famous Olympic skier doing the narration.
For each lodging property owned or managed by the ski resort, I should be able to do a virtual reality tour of guest rooms, shops, restaurants, spas and other common areas, panning around at will to see everything.
I should be overwhelmed with bold designs, sound effects and MTV-type graphics for snowboarding pages. Yeah, boarding rocks! You get the picture. So why isn’t the ski industry seeing what everyone else on the Web is seeing?
Richard Bennion, founder of Virtual Visits in San Mateo, Calif., says that 95 percent of ski resort sites suffer because they aren’t using the tools that are unique to the Internet. “They think of the Internet as a place to put a brochure on-line so that people can get information quickly. The problem is that these sites deliver half as much impact as the real printed brochures. Companies should not be trying to imitate another medium; they should be thinking about what the Internet can do for them that is better than what they have today.”
Bennion says the Internet offers a medium that can deliver different types of media that were not cost-effective before, specifically multimedia slide shows, video and virtual reality. Multi-media is particularly effective, he adds, in communicating your message. “Statistics show that consumers remember 30 percent of what they see, 50 percent of what they hear and 75 percent of what they see and hear,” he says. “Multi-media is a stronger vehicle than text on a printed page.”
Right now, streaming video and slide shows are restricted to small windows on your screen, but software already is being tested to expand them to full-screen size.
“Most resorts are missing the most unique feature of the Internet—its ability to be interactive with the user,” says Bennion. “Even television can’t duplicate the power of a user controlling an environment, which can be done with virtual reality. Giving the user the ability to go up, down and sideways to see different things is a compelling and unique feature of the Web.”
Another common problem is that resorts lag behind in their ability to quickly and easily update their sites. “They rely on third-party vendors to publish new information and that will always inhibit how much they change their sites,” says Bennion. “They need to understand that the tools exist for them to control their own information and provide timely updates.” But many of the small design houses don’t have the software capabilities to do this. Resorts should screen companies carefully, looking for those that understand resort marketing and are plugged into the latest technology.
Bennion’s company, located on the threshold of Silicon Valley, has been around for nine years, and it has produced arguably the best golf resort sites on the Internet. You can click on www.virtual-visits.com to see several top-name resorts represented in glorious virtual reality photography, audio-visual slide shows and video. Looking at a Virtual Visits site is addictive; it takes a lot less concentration to absorb video and audio than to scroll through columns of boring text. And this is the point that resorts are missing. The Internet is becoming sheer entertainment.
If your Internet design strategies are based on the speed of a 28.8 baud modem, you’ve been out of touch with the news. Cable television companies such as media giant TCI already have wired thousands of homes with fiber-optic cable, which effectively eliminates the World Wide Wait, and many thousands more will come on line next year. On top of that, the telephone companies, led by Sprint, are gearing up for new systems using existing lines that will increase Internet speeds by 50 to 100 times, well before the Millennium. With the Internet moving at warp speed, that little on-line brochure will look pretty skimpy.
Finally, resorts need to accept the costs of this new technology. It is not cheap, but it is far more cost-effective than cranking out new videos or CD-ROMs every year. Despite a misimpression held by many ski resort executives, the cost of Internet technology is not going down; it is going up. Shopping for a site is not like shopping for a VCR. Corporate sites routinely cost $90,000 to $125,000 these days, twice as much as two or three years ago.
One way of swallowing what seems to be a bitter pill is to compare this investment with the high-speed quad chair. Skiers found them convenient, comfortable and fast. Resorts that didn’t have them feared they might lose business, so they rushed out to buy them. Likewise, Internet is the fastest and most convenient medium for communicating with skiers, but you need to use the technology to get the most bang for your buck. If you think of your boring Website as a creaky old fixed-grip double chair, you’ll get the idea.
While destination resorts that market worldwide clearly have a need to invest in state-of-the-art Websites, smaller day-skier areas should concentrate on building customer e-mail lists for bulletins and special promotions, as well as developing some form of on-line transaction capability. You can sell season passes electronically, sell lodging or offer discounts for ski lessons and other services.
E-mail communication is far more cost-effective than mailing out newsletters, promo sheets and brochures. And creating an online club is a simple, inexpensive bit of programming—any small Internet design house can do it. This provides a timely and effective direct marketing presence. Smaller ski areas also can benefit by linking to the sites of larger tourism promotion entities such as visitor’s bureaus, chambers of commerce and lodging associations. Sometimes pooling resources to pay for a transaction-based site is the best way to go, especially if budgets are tight.
