We talk a lot about “Trip Planners” in the world of resort marketing. They’re in your website nav, maybe they’re sitting on the table at tradeshows.

But what we’re describing, more often than not, is what items are on our our “Vacation Grocery Store” shelves. The idea I want to propose is that what we need to be doing a lot more of is writing recipes.

Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

A Recipe?
If i wanted to go to Shawnee Mountain, I may poke around on their website or review sites or social media or whatever. Along the way, I’m going to get a lot of information about what the options are at Shawnee Mountain.

Options are the ingredients.

But eventually I need to combine those ingredients into a tasty vacation stew. And like an actual cooking recipe, there are a million ways to combine those options. Some combinations will be okay, some will be terrible, and some will be amazing.

The combination of those options are the recipes.

Help Them
What we often do is leave people like me to their own devices to combine all those cool vacation pieces into a really cool package. And we typically do so under a few assumptions, including the idea that “everyone is different” and probably wants different things.

But if in my search, what if i found this blog post from The French Manor.

Simple and to-the-point, what this hotel has done is nothing more that share one of their favorite recipes for a day trip to Shawnee Mountain.

More
What I’d love to see Trip Planners become is something much more like a recipe book. Maybe you could even call it that. But rather than just a list of pieces, it would include:

• A collection of combinations based on different needs (advice from locals, past guests, etc.)
• Categories for those needs t(“Family”, “Weekend”, etc. instead of “Main Dish”, “Dessert”, etc.)
• More information to help adjust based on specific needs (ie, “If you do end up staying the night, try…”)

As resorts expand their product offerings, the list of potential ingredients will only expand. Maybe it’s time to give our potential guests some starting points.

Maybe instead of an average meal, they’ll end up with the incredible feast you intended.

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.