I’ve often said golf and skiing suffer from very similar challenges.

Both are weather dependent. Both require a balance of frequent locals and less-frequent travelers. Both suffer from a perception of being expensive and elite though neither is true. Both can see a flat year as a good year. Both are struggling to replace the baby boomers they’ve relied on for decades.

What ski is to winter, golf is to summer. Even more, ski resorts like Jay Peak and Park City and Sugarloaf, for all intents and purposes, operate as golf resorts during the summer and intimately know the challenges of both.

It’s for this reason and many more that I’m launching a new site this week called FairwayFillers:
http://www.fairwayfillers.com/

Built on the exact same concept as SlopeFillers, it will share best golf resort marketing best practices, ideas, and stories.

That said, there are a few questions I want to address.

Why golf?
As well as I knew skiing when I started SlopeFillers in 2010, I actually know golf better. In fact, I’ve probably been golfing many more times than I’ve been skiing.

Despite golf’s rep as a luxury, elite sport, I played most of my golf when my family was at it’s lowest point financially thanks to knowing the golf pro and a set of old, sawed-off women’s senior clubs. I don’t think it’s realistic to start an initiative like this without some familiarity the sport and appreciation of key names and stories.

Why another site?
Those of you who have followed SlopeFillers for a while may be scratching your heads a bit because I’ve already written about golf. Many times in fact. So why not make “golf” category on SlopeFillers?

For the same reason I didn’t start a blog about golf and make “ski” a category. Despite all it’s imperfections, SlopeFillers did one thing perfectly: it focused solely on one sport and gave the marketers therein a place of their own.

Why now?
I started SlopeFillers with simple goals, but a big one was to give myself a regular, recurring reason to study the ski industry and better understand it. Today, I find myself with a great job at a great company making incredibly fast headway in golf. In the last few weeks alone Inntopia has signed both Treetops and Half Moon Bay.

The problem? I’ve been studying nothing but ski for the last half-dozen years and now need to quickly ramp up my knowledge of golf. What better way than to use the same model that quickly got me up to speed in ski.

Rolling the Dice
The honest truth is that I have no idea if or how well this is going to work, but if there’s one thing SlopeFillers has taught me it’s this.

When you give talented people a place to learn from each other and share stories of success, good things happen.

That’s my hope for FairwayFillers. And that hope starts today:
http://www.fairwayfillers.com/

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.