This post will be two things.

On the one hand, it will be anecdotal. It will be a simple observation of my own behavior. Of things that make me act. On the other it will be tactical. A quick take on what you can do with this insight.

Let’s start with the story.

I Never Ate at the Resort Until…
In all the days and months and years I’ve been hauling my skinny rear end to the mountain to make turns, there was a time when I could count on less than one finger the moments when I had purchased food from the resort.

I was a cheap, I was poor, I was a lot of things. But long story short, I had never pulled the trigger on a $10 bowl of chili.

But then I did. Twice. And I did so for a simple reason: it was part of my pass.

Let me put this another way. I don’t buy resort food. But I do buy tickets that happen to have a dining credit attached. Especially, and this is the interesting part to me, if the discounted price with food is cheaper than the full price without food.

The Tactics
If the potential in this bundling of ticket + lunch sounds familiar, it should. More than once I’ve heard the Liftopia crew talk about how successful these bundles can be on their platform.

And for that more tactical take, I reached out to Liftopia’s Evan Reece. He confirmed what I had remembered hearing with an asterisk:

“Yes the “add-on” can indeed be a great opportunity, however as with anything it is a function of how you do it not if. Once a resort determines its core pricing philosophy and approach, pricing incremental pre-bundled packages appropriately allows one to put value add products in front of consumers in the product-selection phase of the booking (as opposed to trying to “up-sell” them into the add-on mid purchase flow).”

But he also reminded me that it’s not as simple as a + b = c. In his words:

“How to price those products should be dependent on the in-house margin on those products (food margin vs. rental, for example), goals of the resort (selling into specific retail locations, for example) and in-market competition (for rentals or destination markets with multiple food options, for example).”

In other words, don’t just do it. Do it right.

“In order to be effective – and these products can represent as much as 40% of a resort’s advance sales, nailing the pricing matrix across products is pretty critical.”

The Potential
When you do it right, bundling lunch and lift tickets can be a powerful way to both increase sales but, as I learned with my story, also increase satisfaction.

Brown baggers may lover their brown bags, but once I finally grabbed that bowl of chili or those chicken fingers, once I ate a warm meal that didn’t require massive pockets or a trip back to the car, once I had seen the light, it was hard to go back.

Some food for thought from a brown bag convert going into the winter season.

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.