There are some incredibly powerful options available in resort lodging software. I just wish more of them were given a nice ‘do before they were considered ready for customers.

One place I’d start would be booking confirmations.

Before
When I got the confirmation for my little family’s trip to Telluride a couple months ago, I immediately started sketching how I’d approach it. Here’s how it looked (the yellow highlights are from the words I used to search for it in Gmail):

Yes, my first name is Donald (I go by my middle name, it’s a family thing), but the big problems I saw were:

• No rhyme or reason to where things were placed
• Small text that was hard to read on mobile (which turned out to be really important)
• Lots of redundant info that’s also found on the site

I hate to say it because some developers are amazing designers, but I think you know what I mean when I say it looks like it was designed by the same person who wrote the software.

After
So, I worked off of the same template I used for the snow reports and came up with this.

Now, truth be told, this draft is missing a couple things that could be helpful like a link to directions or a customer service phone number (or a color scheme other than red that feels like an error or color used to point out mistakes), but overall, the goal was to:

• Simplify the content by only showing what will verify the key details of my reservation
• Be clear about where to get more details or edit the reservation
• Make it easy to read on a mobile device

Here it is:

Like I said, it’s far from perfect, and perhaps this is geared more at the lodging software guys, but this is the direction I’d love to see confirmations go.

Right now, they’re kinda broken. Maybe this is one way I think it could be fixed.

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.