Consider my saga. I was just noodling around, trying to get useful information and maybe, if the information was appealing enough, book a long weekend’s stay. After all, I’ve been wired for years and I’d heard that a lot of ski areas and resort associations were now almost as hip as their customers.
I tried to get advice winter-booking information last June. Admittedly that’s early, but ski areas by then have done the Ski Group trade show circuit and know their basic rates (if not the hallowed daily lift ticket price). But the areas I happened to click on to—an unscientific sample—weren’t even ready to hedge. In June, the home pages that were actually working were eager to tell me that they had mountain-bike trails and bluegrass concerts. Some home pages just told me that they were retooling their sites and I should try them later. Didn’t say how much later, so I didn’t retry. I found some ski travel agents’ Websites operational, but darned if I could raise much of a response, or even a brochure.
Then, I began serious Internet shopping around St. Patrick’s Day. Surely the areas would be geared up and glitch-free by then. I started with the area that has been heralded on every business news page in the country, the American Skiing Company’s flagship, Sunday River. Previously, I’d tried its site in January, when the lead item on my local newscasts was the devastation caused to power lines and mountain roads. What Sunday River had to tell me was that new snow had fallen and that New England skiers were hardy. I sent them an e-mail query about road conditions and hotel operations. I never got an answer. Oh well. Maybe their power was still down and those vaunted marketeers didn’t know the rest of America was eating New England catastrophe reports for breakfast.
One evening in March, I clicked onto the Sunday River site at 8:35 to check out lodging deals. I waited what, in Internet terms, could be considered forever (real time: six minutes). I had to fidget while their complicated graphics downloaded. And downloaded. Zowie! A guy in a chartreuse parka. Was that supposed to make me want to come right up and ski?
At 8:50, I clicked on Sunday River’s lodging button. I got a screen full of adjectives and an invitation to “call us at 800 543 2SKI.” If I had done that 15 minutes before, I’d probably have finished booking a condo.
Then I called Michigan’s Shanty Creek, a non-giant area that has a reputation for sharp marketing. Its Website was faster and clearer than Sunday River’s, but still a bit confusing. (I didn’t realize that Summit Slopes was the name of the other ski area in the complex, the one that’s not Schuss Mountain). But Shanty Creek also wanted people to get off line and on to a telephone to do business with a human sales person. (I could just hear a pleasant voice saying, “No, but we could give you a lovely condo that weekend.”)
Because Snowmass was one of the areas that had been working to improve its Internet presentation during the past summer, I tried clicking on to see how it came out. But www.snowmass.com got me nowhere. I, a former Snowmass Village resident, had to suffer the indignity of getting info on my old hometown by keying in www.skiaspen.com. This connected me to the Aspen Skiing Company’s site. My eye was caught first, not by snow shots, not even a guy in a chartreuse parka, but a headline about the upcoming Aspen Music Festival. Upcoming in June.
The romance copy promised that the site had “thousands of pages of great information for you.” I didn’t want thousands. I wanted a few. I didn’t get them on the first attempt. The electronic pages covering rates, lodging and packages were, said my Internet carrier, “not retrievable.” Then I dealt with a frozen screen for 30 minutes before hanging up.
On a second try, I actually succeeded in clicking onto the hyperlink labeled “Snowmass Resort Association,” which I, correctly, guessed meant the organization that last year changed its name to “Snowmass Village Resort Association.” I didn’t get there—for a while. Came a screen that described itself as New Service Security and asked me to fill out an inscrutable form. I hit a lot of keys and eventually got a page resembling a proper resort home page. Oddly it was headed Grail Skico Intercept. Is getting to the Snowmass page supposed to be like finding the Holy Grail? The process takes about as long as a production of “Parsifal,” the Wagner opera that deals with that search.
But miraculously, not five minutes after I cleared (or evaded) the security checkpoint, I was dealing, if not wheeling, with a genuine reservation service. No, I was told electronically, no one-bedroom condos with front-desk service were available March 19 to 24, but when I gave my second choice, March 31 to April 4, I was shown a variety of availabilities and a click-on way to book directly on line.
Not bad. Even at the masterly and justifiably revered Website of Steamboat (fast! factual! understandable!), I could have bought tickets on line, but to buy a package I would have had to fill in an onscreen request form and then wait to get a telephone call from a staff human, an event promised to occur within 24 hours.
What is it with skimeisters’ Webmasters? Have they decided people don’t feel comfortable posting their credit card numbers on something called the World Wide Web, a fear that so far hasn’t stopped Amazon, Barns & Noble, L.L. Bean, et al? Or, do they just put more faith in the ability of their staff humans to “clinch a sale”?
Or is it they just don’t know what to do with this fantastic new tool?
Fortunately, their customers do. Skiers I’ve talked to say they go directly to the travel-information Websites: GoSki, ISki, Ski Central, Ski Odessey, etc. The last named outfit claims to have heard from 3.25 million skiers in the past 12 months. Even SkiNet, the site operated by Ski and Skiing magazines, propels its visitors to a lodging-choice position faster than most ski area sites and gives the same reservations phone numbers as the area sites.
Other skiers I know head for the general-travel sites on the Web: Fodor’s, Frommer’s, the various Microsoft operations. Some say they have become adept at finding what they want by clicking on hyperlinks such as an airline or a state bed-and-breakfast association, with direct links to dozens of individual lodges. (One Berkshires’ bed-and-breakfast owner told me that’s how she gets most of her business.)
A Website isn’t a throwaway, like a ballpoint pen with the ski area’s name. It is, or should be, a marketplace for information. And sales.
So what do I think ski areas should do? Get in, get out or cut down. And update. In late March, I kept encountering bulletins about nifty preseason bargains.
If a management isn’t ready to splurge on a Steamboat-type direct-selling site—and most won’t be—it should consider a just-the-facts information page, preferably with simple graphics (a trail map always looks nice) and some phone numbers (preferably toll-free) where skiers can make reservations or ask questions. Links to a reservation service, travel agent or transportation company could be helpful in nailing down customers.
Whatever you do, lose the guy in the chartreuse parka, the time-consuming graphics and the dude-speak. Many ski site-designers assume that their Internet audience is composed exclusively of pubescent males. Actually, recent studies show that the average age of Internet users is rising, just like the age of skiers everywhere.
Check out the sites of other areas for ideas and non-starters. For instance, Wolf Creek, I found—with enormous difficulty—opens with smashing art then makes great use of simple, speedily unloaded text. So what was the difficulty. The site ain’t called wolfcreek.com. It’s wolfcreekski. Shopping Vail? Try www.snow.com. Beaver Creek? www.vail.net. That’s classic skidom, user hostile.
Check out non-ski operations. The resort Website that impressed me most belongs to Hotel Amandara. It has fourcolor pictures of its rooms and its chef’s signature dishes—and a reservations link. The establishment isn’t in Silicon Valley. It’s in Na Trang, Vietnam.
Abby Rand was travel editor for Ski and resort editor for Snow Country magazines and has written numerous articles about ski travel for other publications as well as three ski travel guides.
