TECHNOLOGY
Arosa Lenzerheide faced a couple
of challenges that made it difficult
to predict annual revenue, including
varying snow conditions and rising
travel costs. For the 2017/18 ski season,
the management team at Arosa
Lenzerheide set a goal to increase
revenue generated from online ticket
sales. The specific objectives were to
double online ticket revenue from
200,000 CHF ($201,042) to 400,000
CHF ($402,084) and to drive online
transactions so that in a few years, 50
percent of tickets will be purchased
online in advance.
To help Arosa Lenzerheide achieve
its goals, Liftopia combined the resort’s
data with its own proprietary
pricing model based on 13 years of
historical data to create a dynamic
pricing strategy that offers skiers a
more attractive price the earlier the
guests are willing to commit to their
ski holiday. Pricing strategies designed
by Liftopia and sold on its platform
respond to consumer demand.
For instance, low demand days have a
different pricing curve from high demand
days.
“The dynamic platform helps our
partners run their businesses more
efficiently,” said Evan Reece, CEO and
co-founder of Liftopia. “Liftopia has always
been singularly focused on the efficiency
of our partners’ marketing funnels
and our strategies help reinforce
customer buying behavior. Liftopia
also identifies for resorts where revenue
opportunities exist in their data to
make real-time, dynamic corrections.”
Liftopia offers its resort partners a
best-in-class e-commerce solution,
which boasts industry leading conversion
rates and user interface, and a
continually optimized checkout path,
which helps partners generate greater
revenues. That’s certainly the case
for Arosa Lenzerheide. By partnering
with Liftopia, the resort’s pre-sale
revenue increased from 200,000 CHF
to 5,300,000 CHF ($5,327,624), greatly
exceeding the management team’s expectations.
In addition, 25 percent of
total ticket revenue came from products
that were purchased online.
“We chose to partner with Liftopia
because of their proven track record
of increasing pre-sales for ticketing
businesses in North America and pioneering
dynamic pricing now used by
hundreds of ski areas,” said Philipp
Holenstein, CEO of Arosa Lenzerheide.
“The ongoing assessment of the
strategy during the season by Liftopia’s
analytics team and the possibility
to measure the success in real-time
made them the obvious choice for a
pricing partner.”
Arosa Lenzerheide is just one of
the ski resorts Liftopia has helped
to achieve their revenue goals. Since
Liftopia’s inception in 2005, it has developed
and fine-tuned a proprietary
e-commerce web-shop platform with
a revenue-management model, data
structure and toolset focused on
dynamic pricing. With a dedicated
focus on increasing ski resorts’ presales,
the U.S.-based Liftopia has
carved out a niche for itself in a highly
competitive industry.
Why has Liftopia been so successful?
When resorts choose to work with
Liftopia, they gain access to real-time
purchasing dashboards and business
intelligence tools.
“Liftopia turns marketing dollars
into transactions,” said Reece. “We are
very passionate about helping an industry
we love to thrive. Although ‘dynamic
pricing’ is now a very trendy topic,
we believe we are different. When we
started in 2005, we were foundationally
a pricing company and therefore all
of our e-commerce tools, data and reporting
are explicitly designed around
empowering these strategies.”
Liftopia gives partner resorts access
to customized dashboards throughout
the year, so they determine whether
their pricing strategies are optimized
for the market conditions. The
analytics team also provides detailed,
measurable key performance indicators
such as revenue, online consumer
behavior, regional benchmarks and
upcoming bookings.
Forty-one percent of guests
who purchased lift passes
online reloaded a SkiData
card, allowing them to skip
the ticket line and head
right to the mountain.
28 September 2018 | snowopsmag.com
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