This summer our family is heading north to ride our bikes on the famous Hiawatha Trail. If that name is unfamiliar, it’s a 15 mile, downhill rail trail that passes through long tunnels and the incredibly beautiful Montana mountains.

It also happens to start at a ski resort: Lookout Pass.

And I happen to be a fan of ski resorts. So I jumped on their website, started poking around and was pleasantly surprised by a few features that Lookout Pass has figured out but other, larger mountains haven’t.

#1) Counting the Days
Season length is absolutely a selling point and absolutely something resorts should be excited about. But, often, it’s only celebrated at certain milestones (100, 150, etc.) or after the season is over. I love how right in the headline on their first hero image is not just the fact they’ll be open, but the number these days will be in their season.

#2) Visible, Reason-Filled Opt-In
There are resorts that know and love and believe in email marketing, but you wouldn’t know it from the tiny opt-in form hidden in the footer of their website. Lookout Pass’s is full-width, not buried at the bottom of their homepage, and filled with really good copy that shows a handful of reasons to subscribe without getting too wordy.

#3) Front and Center Operating Hours
Some resorts who operate on consistent operating hours every day of the season can get away with tucking this info down in a footer or snow report page, but when these hours fluctuate? Or even just differ once or twice a season? Man, put that stuff front and center like Lookout Pass. Hours are both one of the most common questions skiers have and one of the hardest bits of information to find on a website. Not so with Lookout Pass.

I’ve talked about this a lot lately, but it’s easy to forget that a website is successful not when it looks like a work of art, but when it helps people get inspired to do things, find things, and buy things as easily as possible.

Lookout Pass does this really well. Nice work, gang, and I look forward to seeing your corner of the world this summer!

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.