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In my own marketing needs as of late I’ve found myself faced with a recurring task: finding a slightly different way to say the same thing.

Sales and offers are a good example of that. They aren’t always the sexiest part of resort marketing, but they are a great way to sweeten the pot enough to get folks to bite on something and move your needle a little closer to where you need it to be. But because they aren’t as exciting as other campaigns, they don’t always get a lot of love.

So, today, I’m changing that by rounding up a few offers I’ve seen recently to get the wheels turning.

1. Mission Ridge’s Parking Discounts

First up is Mission Ridge offering lift ticket discounts when you park in a lower, overflow lot that’s service by a shuttle. I’ve talked about this one before, but I love the way they trading they’re owning up to the slight inconvenience using a shuttle requires and offering an olive branch (and incentive) of a small discount for folks who help them manage parking by using this lot. This is a separate product sold in their online store for select days.

2. Snowbasin Mid-Season Sale

Snowbasin had a few things they wanted to push – lessons, tickets, and local lodging – so they used a Mid-Season Sale label to group these into a single promotion. I like the simple branding and I like that they had some dedicated creative for the various channels they used to promote it. For example, on social media that had custom graphics and animations and their email template was the same featuring custom graphics and a countdown timer.

3. Sundance Summer Concert Early Access

This move from Sundance is clever. They want to fill rooms and they want to sell tickets to their concerts, so they’re combining both and trading early access to their summer concert tickets for lodging reservations. Book lodging and you get exclusive access to tickets for concerts held during your stay. The exclusivity is in the access, so they didn’t even have to include a discount.

4. Killington Spring Pass

For all the complexity resorts are willing to add to their season pass table, I’m surprised more resorts don’t offer something like a Spring Pass for the last month or two of the season. Killington’s commitment to a long season allows them to sell this pass to skiers from other (soon to be closed) mountains, but even if you’re one of those seasons I love the idea of a prorated or partial-season pass as an an automation upsell / bounce-back to folks buying lift tickets.

5. Sugarloaf Midweek Lodging + Spring

Speaking of that automated upsell, a decent number of those lift ticket purchasers are likely from out of town, so I love Sugarloaf’s approach. First, they pushed a ticket pack instead of a spring pass and, in tandem, pushed midweek lodging discounts. A nice little combination of offers going into the warmer months as seen in this clean email campaign.

Quick Recap

Like I said, offers aren’t as sexy as a super-creative branding story, but they’re a tactic that’s always good to spend some time studying. And lest we get caught up in the specific campaign and miss the concept these resorts are using, let’s recap those tactics:

• Incentivize behavior with discounts that helps you operationally
• Bundle products into one promo and give it a name/timeframe
• Use exclusivity instead of discounts to push related products
• Offer partial-season access depending on your season length
• Upsell discounted, late-season tickets+lodging to out of towners

See any other offers or sales or ideas out there? Let me know, I’m sure I’m missing some good ones.

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.