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

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.