As I’ve studied the crossover between social media and guest behavior, all signs seem to point to these new media outlets being a place for loyal guests to connect rather than creating significant numbers of new customers.

But that has value and these channels can certainly increase loyalty. So, in that context of that idea, where else could resorts connect with their loyal guests?

I love books.

Though I’m sometimes picky about the titles I’ll actually read cover-to-cover, I enjoy the fact that I don’t have to look at a screen and can consume something that is the result of 100x as much effort as the web content I read.

One of the book-types I’ve started to gather over more recent years is, as you likely guessed, skiing.

A Formula
Ski books come in a few shapes and forms.

Going left to right in the image below, the first is what happens if you don’t write a book about your resort (that’s a joke), the second is a coffee table style title with less focus on text and more effort into high quality images that tell the resort’s story, with the third being a sort of memoir written from the perspective of an early founder of a resort (Edna and Max Dercum of Araphaoe Basin and Keystone fame).

In each case it’s a simple formula: take the entrepreneurial, nostalgic, skiing-centric story of your resort and place it in a medium that has more greater perceived value, weight, and , quite literally, shelf life.

More Examples
If you look around for even just a few minutes, you’ll quickly realize that neither Arapahoe Basin nor Bogus Basin are alone.

• Vail
• Beaver Creek
• Gunstock
• Mt. Bachelor
• Taos
• Squaw Alpine

In that list you’ll find a little bit of everything. Coffee table books, memoirs, a little bit of “insiders” info mixed in, narrated stories, the whole lot.

Print is Not Dead
As much as we love to create things out of 1’s and 0’s, I feel like there is still a ton of overlooked value in print content (and maybe even more so now because of the prevalence of digital).

Social is great, but books are one more way to connect loyal fans with the content and stories that can make them even more so. And, thanks to technology, printing a book has never been easier.

More food for thought.

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.