“It got off to a slow start,” says Carole Corbeil, Internet manager at Tremblant Resort in Quebec. The resort and its parent company, Intrawest, were on the cutting edge of e-commerce technology when they launched online vacation booking last February. Corbeil reports that e-business finally began to show signs of life in June. “It’s still less than 5 percent of bookings, but the growth is exponential,” she says. Of Ski magazine’s Top 60 resorts in North America, about a third offered transactional booking on their Websites as of September 1999. Almost all of the rest offered online forms that promised contact from a resort customer service representative. And many are getting their feet wet in e-commerce by offering logo items and season pass sales online.
The promise of online bookings is that customers can help themselves, reducing the need for customer-service labor. Currently, the promise is largely unfulfilled. One of the challenges is the complex set of variables, including airfare, a wide selection of lodging with amenities and lift ticket options. Inevitably, some customers will have questions not addressed on a Website.
“The biggest problem is that online buyers often request more information than we can give,” says Corbeil. “People go to our Website ready to buy at 3 a.m., but if they have just one question, we have no [24-hour-a-day] backup to answer.” For now, nocturnal customers can use voicemail or e-mail to leave messages. “It’s a nice problem to have, but something we must work on.”
Corbeil manages a three-employee department, expected to grow to five this year. “A year ago, I was alone,” she says. So a program designed to cut labor cost is, paradoxically, adding positions at Tremblant. The good news is that the technology in place works, but two factors are impeding progress.
First, transaction security is a consumer concern, but the concern is steadily eroding. In the travel world beyond skiing, market researchers NPD Group found that 28 percent of visitors to hotel Websites booked rooms online in the first half of 1999, up from 21 percent last year. And 84 percent were “extremely” or “somewhat” satisfied by the experience.
The other impediment is Y2K. Technology departments are more focused on ensuring that their legacy databases will function on January 1 than making those databases available to online consumers. But despite the obstacles, interest among customers seems to be smoothing whatever bumps are in the road.
Vail Resorts, too, reports a “healthy increase” in online sales above last year, according to Communications Director Paul Witt. The Colorado conglomerate this year upgraded its online booking service to include more hotels, airfare and ski school reservations.
Vail, like many of the major destination areas that offer online bookings, contracted with WorldRes, a San Mateo, Calif., company that brokers hotel rooms worldwide. American Skiing Company resorts, most of Intrawest (except Whistler/Blackcomb) and selected Booth Creek ski areas also use WorldRes. The company was able to capture its large market share by partnering with Resort Sports Network, the resort-based television production and Internet company, which already had relationships with most of the major resorts.
WorldRes not only supports booking on a ski area’s own Website, it brings an automatic distribution network. The company provides travel sites like GoSki.com and portals like Yahoo, Snap and America Online with an inventory of available rooms and prices at partner hotels. When a skier visits one of those sites and makes a reservation, the transaction is reported to WorldRes and relayed to the hotel. WorldRes skims a commission of between 3 and 10 percent of the cost of the booked room. The referring site takes up to 30 percent of WorldRes’s transaction fee.
But WorldRes is not without rivals. Destinations.com of Seattle, Buffalo and Toronto, counts Breckenridge, Sun Valley, Telluride and the Vail Valley Tourism and Convention Bureau among its clients. The company was formed by the 1998 merger of Virtual AdVentures, an adventure-travel company, and Reservation Technologies, a software company.
The third player in the game is inntopia.com, a Vermont-based company aiming to wire independent lodging properties for e-business. Inntopia hit the market with two free software packages last June. The company’s innSynch software links a front-desk operations system with a property’s Website, inntopia’s Website, the local central reservations agency and inntopia’s global online booking network in real time.
Inntopia’s companion product, CenRes, connects a central-reservations agency’s database with the front desk of each member hotel for real-time inventory management. CenRes, used by the Sugarbush Chamber of Commerce, also links directly to the agency’s Website.
Inntopia is tapping into the online auction trend to help hotels fill rooms. In a business model popularized by Priceline.com to sell airline tickets and mortgages, online shoppers can name their own price for lodging. The offers are backed up by credit cards and innkeepers decide whether to accept. Properties are charged a 5 percent commission on bookings sold via the online auctions.
Vermont’s Okemo Mountain Resort is among the first ski areas to sign with inntopia, but so far the results have been inauspicious. “Online bookings have been slow,” says Okemo Director of Public Relations Pam Cruickshank. “It’s surprising because our Website has been a huge success.” But Cruickshank is patient for now, acknowledging the obvious power of an automated system that accepts reservations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Someday soon, John Q. Skier will not only be able to book a trip online, but will also research it in much greater depth through virtual reality media. Imagine clicking into three-dimensional photos or a video tour of room 4B at the Sitzmark Hotel. Skiers can make sure the balcony has a view of the ski trails, the television screen is large enough for a Super Bowl party and the carpet isn’t vintage shag.
As early as this winter, Tremblant plans to begin offering detailed photos (though not 3D) of selected lodging units. “The main challenge is quality control,” says Corbeil. “We have to make sure that the photos are high quality, recent and accurate.”
Once skiers become satisfied that they’ve thoroughly researched a vacation, and they trust the Internet no less than they trust a waiter with their credit cards, there’s no reason a resort shouldn’t be ready, willing and technically able to accept money online. No matter what time of night.
Ron Rudolph, a former editor for Snow Country and Mountain Sports and Living, is editorial director for ZEFER, an Internet services firm specializing in e-commerce.
