I’d been looking forward to a demo of this product for a long time. Months, actually. So, when the booth was clear (a rare occasion, honestly) on Tuesday evening at NSAA, I pounced and have been nerding out ever since.

The product I am speaking of is Liftopia’s Partner Intelligence tool.

The Greatest Answer
A few weeks ago, I was asked “which brand do you put more emphasis on: SlopeFillers or Gregg Blanchard?” The answer, with very little hesitation, was SlopeFillers. The reason why is quite simple: unless I can wire 2,000,000 rows of social media data into my brain, SlopeFillers will always be 100x smarter than me.

When Evan Reece was asked a question about a resort marketing theory that, honestly, sounded completely legit during his arrival-day presentation, his answer was simply, “you’d think that, but the data say otherwise.”

Data takes much of the guesswork out of marketing. It has the answers. If you have data, you only have to be smart enough to know how to take advantage of those numbers, no flawless intuition necessary.

The Goods
The partner intelligence tool is made up of a few parts. First, is a grid showing booking totals and trends for bookings, revenues, and searches through both Liftopia and the Cloudstore.

See those yellow boxes? That’s what happens when one of those metrics updates (in real-time mind you). They only update when people buy lift tickets to your resorts.

Next comes a series of three timelines showing search, capture, and rate statistics for each day of the season for your resort through those same channels, allowing resorts to make real-time, intelligent decisions about pricing to maximize revenue on their lift tickets.

If that’s not enough it also shows:

• You vs the region benchmarks
• The last 10 purchases
• An interactive map of where your orders are coming from
• And a count of how many guests are coming today

One of my favorite parts, however, is the beautifully designed and organized package all of this comes in. It’s one thing to make the data available, it’s another to present it in a way to makes it easy to sort though, follow, and, most importantly, understand.

Make No Mistake
While it’s easy to get wrapped up in the “nifty factor” of this tool, don’t forget how powerful it really is. On one page, resorts can get almost everything they need to make intelligent decisions that maximize revenues though Liftopia and Cloudstores.

In my book, this is more of what the industry needs: key data simplified down to the point where we can focus more on acting on what we see than interpreting it.

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.