Resort lodging is a fascinating Rubiks cube of messaging and balance.

You’ve got OTAs, you’ve got direct. You’ve got lodging you own, you’ve got lodging the rest of the destination owns. You’ve got your perks, they’ve got theirs. You are selling something very similar yet very different at the same time.

What I want to talk about today is not the dynamics of those balances, but something I’ve noticed about the way resorts often communicate the perks that address these balances.

Typical vs Tremblant
What I typically see are what you might describe as a paragraph or, on occasion, bullet points or even fine print. For example, this paragraph sits between the headline and the big glossy photos of lodging options on one resort’s page:

“All of the lodging options offer full concierge services as well as ski lockers, access to the fitness center, game room, media room, outdoor pool and hot tub.”

I’d been on that resort’s lodging page many times and never read those words or, if I had, didn’t remember the message they were trying to get me to remember.

Now compare that paragraph to what shows up right at the top of Tremblant’s lodging page:

They’ve taken the same list of perks and done three things:

• Given them a short, memorable name.
• Given them a simple, identifiable icon.
• Made both big, bold, and visible right at the top.

I think this is brilliant. They have, in effect, taken some of the same powerful patterns behind a logo or brand and applied them to their most important perks.

Smart, Simple
This, like so many things that catch my eye, sit at the intersection between smart and simple.

It’s one thing to have an idea, it’s another to boil it down to the essence that preserves the principles that make it effective but removes the complexity that would prevent you from putting it into practice. In Tremblant’s case, this simple anchor they’ve built for these perks is not just effective but a great replacement for text-heavy copy in other places like print or video.

We’ve all got perks that are meant to address key aspects of our offer, but Tremblant applied some brand-level thinking to make them stick. Awesome work.

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.