Destination Summit was an awesome event, as usual. Also as usual, I took a few risks by breaking the mold of typical conference content.

One such session was a group of four millennial marketers delivering a series of short, to-the-point analyses of how they have been successful marketing to their peers and, more importantly, why those campaigns worked.

Every speaker did an awesome job, but one question asked by Dave Amirault surprised me.

The (Lack of) Responses
To be clear, it wasn’t the question itself that surprised me, it was the answers…or lack thereof. The question was:

“How many of you have purchased and used a lift ticket through Liftopia?”

Now, let’s back up a second. Liftopia ticket sales represent about 1% of all skier visits each season. They have so much insight into skier data they can give you a real-time look into your demand and pricing.

But how many people in a room of 75 resort marketers raised their hands?

Zero.

Two, Important Pieces
Technically there was one person in the room who had, but he was so surprised by the lack of hands he forgot to raise his: Me.

I’ve purchased maybe a half dozen tickets through Liftopia. I’ve also purchased lodging through Inntopia, passes through RTP, etc. withmy own money. I do this for two reasons:

• First, I want to see how the plaforms work as a customer, not a marketer.
• Second, I want to see how it feels to make that purchase. I want to experience and remember the pain of paying.

Why would both of these things be important? As Dave pointed out in his session, if the resort allows mobile redeption of your Liftopia voucher and you don’t have internet service, how exactly do you do that?

If you’ve never gone through the process – if you’ve never been your own customer – you simply wouldn’t have seen that issue.

A Challenge
I challenge you to go and buy something from a competitor. A round of golf, a ticket, a pass, etc.

Resist the urge to call your friend and get a comp. Just sign on to their website, browse, study, search, find a good deal, pull our your very own credit card and make the purchase.

Pay attention to what annoys you and how it feels, and I promise you’ll learn something worth many times the price you pay.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.