Are Your Resort’s Marketing Communications Bilingual?
Gregg Blanchard /
I’ve never heard someone speak Spanish in the lift line. Chinese? Yes. Japanese? Yes. German, Russian, French? Yes, yes, yes. But not Spanish. The crazy part is that 12% of Utahns (over 340,000) are Hispanic. The further East you go, the smaller that number becomes, but in most states, the number is growing. It’s hard to ignore.
Over the weekend, I set out on a quest to see how many resort websites reaching out to groups that don’t speak English. Much like I expected, the pickins were slim, but here are three ways that I found to show some love to our non-English-speaking skier friends.
1) A Separate Site in Another Language
Vail’s “Destino Vail” site is completely in Spanish (except for the tagline on their logo and Facebook page). A lot of work, but sends a clear message to Spanish speakers that they are important enough to warrant an entire site created just for them. This is rare enough that I think a single factor like this could tip the scales for a Hispanic family making the decision where to vacation this winter. The big downside to this page is that the only link I found to it from Vail’s normal site was the very bottom of a light gray list in the footer. No visual cues to help them find it, just a single link in a very small font.
http://www.destinovail.com/
2) Flags of the Nations Linking to Translated Pages
Telluride has a separate page which has been translated into a handful of languages with various stats and tidbits of information. The page isn’t too thorough, but I love the visual cue for visitors who don’t speak English. Deer Valley also has something similar with less details but more languages available, as does Whistler/Blackcomb:
http://tellurideskiresort.com/Tellski/info/international-spanish.aspx
http://www.deervalley.com/about/about-deer-valley_russian.html
http://ww1.whistlerblackcomb.com/japan/index.htm
3) Google Translate
It’s quick, it’s dirty, it will have lot of mistakes, but it may just work. The Google Translate site widget is a quick fix and covers 20x as many languages as you could ever feisibly do manually.
http://translate.google.com/translate_tools