Aspen Skiing Company
With three lodging properties and four world-class mountains in the Colorado Rockies, the Aspen Skiing Company operates some of the world's premier winter sports destinations.
Challenge
· To build a scalable, personalizable site that supports e-commerce.
· To develop a distributed content management system.
Benefits
· 50% increase in Internet-based sales (lift tickets and lodging)
· Reduced maintenance costs—with content management system, non-technical employees can administer the site
· Site experiences 300,000 user sessions and one million page views per month
Project Details
With three lodging properties and four world-class mountains in the Colorado Rockies—Snowmass, Ajax, Buttermilk, and Aspen Highlands—the Aspen Skiing Company (ASC) operates some of the world's premier winter sports destinations. For over 50 years, the company has welcomed millions of skiers and snowboarders who come to enjoy the beauty and invigorating excitement of this acclaimed resort from around the world.
The high Internet adoption rate among skiing and snowboarding enthusiasts—88% of Aspen/Snowmass guests have Internet access—makes the ASC's Web strategy critical to the marketing of its facilities and the management of customer relations. By building an engaging, personalized site with acclaimed products from Macromedia, ASC's online sales of lift tickets and lodging have reached more than three million dollars—a 50% increase in one year.
Building a More Robust Web Site
ASC was one of the first in the industry to use the Web as a marketing and guest-services medium. In those pioneering days, the site largely served as an online brochure before it evolved into a more dynamic site with regularly refreshed images, job postings, and much more.
However, according to Lura Padrutt Griffiths, site architect at Aspen Skiing Company, even these improvements didn't meet ASC's vision of its site's potential. "While the site did have a small amount of somewhat dynamic content, it really didn't go far enough," she said. "The site was constructed by a third-party consulting firm with primitive content management and a very proprietary architecture. It was difficult to add content, the site did not scale well, and it was very difficult to customize the site itself to evolve with our marketing strategy. We were looking at a complete rewrite of the site."
ASC evaluated many different software platforms before selecting products from Macromedia. ASC chose Macromedia because Macromedia products are consistently rated—by customers and analysts—among the most productive, versatile, and accessible in the industry.
Macromedia enables both high profile and up-and-coming companies to create innovative Web solutions with a family of application servers and visual tools that combine with its application framework to form a complete software infrastructure for building online applications.
ASC decided to build the site using Macromedia ColdFusion and Macromedia Spectra. Once the software had been selected, ASC chose MINDSEYE, a Macromedia Alliance Partner, to be its integrator. "We didn't want to be dependent on another company to make changes to our site," said Griffiths. "We subscribe to the 'teach-a-man-to-fish' philosophy of independence—and MINDSEYE really understood the importance of knowledge transfer.
Together, ASC and MINDSEYE worked to create and implement a new Web strategy. One of the main strategy challenges was to create a site that would appeal to a broad customer base that has a variety of spending habits, psychographics, life stage interests, and Web familiarity. Ultimately, eight different customer types were identified and the site was designed to offer customers an experience tailored to meet their individual needs. ASC was excited to offer a personalized approach that spoke to the unique needs and desires of their diverse customer base.
The second challenge was to build a site with strong e-commerce capabilities that would increase revenue by encouraging site visitors to purchase lift tickets and reserve slots in ski schools. ASC and MINDSEYE accomplished this by integrating MINDSEYE's programming and design with an online version of Resort POS—a lift ticket sales and ski school reservation system built in ColdFusion from Resort Technology Partners.
Lastly, ASC wanted to remove the "webmaster bottleneck" for publishing new material to the site. ASC's implementation of ColdFusion and Macromedia Spectra enabled them to build a robust distributed content management system that empowers users of all types to publish content to the site.
ColdFusion—an application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications that integrate browser, server, and database—enables Web developers to build sophisticated applications quickly and easily. Macromedia Spectra is an application framework that leverages ColdFusion to provide a system for content management, personalization, and online commerce. The combination of ColdFusion's open integration with databases, e-mail, directories, XML, and enterprise systems with Macromedia Spectra's framework enables individuals throughout the company - no matter the level of technical competency—to quickly publish content to the Web independently.
"We chose Macromedia Spectra because it approaches Web application development with a strategic vision of
Meeting Requirements, Exceeding Expectations
"Macromedia Spectra was an incredible value for what it provides," said Griffiths. "It provides more features and power for significantly less of an investment than its competitors. And I also was very impressed by Macromedia as a company. They have the right resources, support, and can-do attitude that we liked."
After two months spent carefully developing the site's information architecture—"We measured twice to cut once," said Megan Dworshak, Senior Project Manager for MINDSEYE. Three developers from MINDSEYE and one from ASC completed the coding and development work in three months. During that time, MINDSEYE worked closely with ASC and their print design vendor to create a functional and attractive user interface that includes Macromedia Flash. The new site, AspenSnowmass.com launched in August 2000.
"ColdFusion and Spectra are an ideal development platform," Griffiths said, "because they grow with you. If you're a novice developer, you can accomplish a great deal after just a short time. But if you're an experienced developer, there are high-level features that are quite powerful, too."
Using the personalization capabilities of Macromedia Spectra, aspensnowmass.com allows users to differentiate themselves as a skier, snowboarder, local visitor, family vacationer, or first-time visitor to their mountains. After choosing the appropriate category, site users can find information on events, lift tickets, rentals, ski schools, and insider tips targeted for each category. The members area of the site takes the users a step further, allowing guests to create their own Aspen/Snowmass homepage and letting them register for e-mailed snow reports, lodging specials, and more.
Guests receive the information they need to feel like full-fledged members of the Aspen/Snowmass community long before, and after, their visit to the Rockies.
"Our new site has met our initial requirements and exceeded our expectations," said Griffiths. "With Spectra, we're able to serve up our content according to our eight different customer types, so visitors receive a more personalized experience at our site. That's an important step to building the relationship with the customer.
"We've also used Spectra to push out content management responsibilities to dozens of people in 13 different departments, ranging from HR and marketing to the ski schools and group ticket sales. That means people of all skill levels—from 65-year-old 'online ambassadors' to tech-savvy folks in PR and marketing can publish their own content independently. That dramatically improves the quality of our site. Let's face it, if it's hard to use, people won't do it. But our site makes it easy for anyone to post a press release, update snow reports, or upload new images, so our site stays fresh. Our contributors make about 85% of the site updates through Spectra."
E-Commerce Doubles Revenues
Another key aspect of the site is that it enables site visitors to purchase lift tickets online before they arrive at Aspen/Snowmass. "We now have an online store that's open 24x7 to let people buy their tickets and reserve slots in the ski schools," Griffiths said. "This, our second season, we're anticipating about $3.5 million in online sales. That's up from $2.1 million last year. We attribute that increase to the fact that our site has more and fresher content—visitors are getting appropriate information from our site that's leading them to purchase with confidence."
Griffiths also noted that direct marketing through e-mail has performed more strongly thanks to the revamped site. "We are using content managed by our Spectra system to create some very-high-impact HTML opt-in e-mails to our customers," she said. "We can re-purpose our images and content to keep an ongoing dialogue with our registered members and encourage repeat traffic to the site."
Ultimately, our new Web site is all about doing more," she explained. "We give guests more information and a better quality product. These tasks were so time consuming before that we would do less. Now, Spectra lets us divide and distribute the work load so that we can all get more done and operate a far better Web site."
Site Summary
Aspen Skiing Company
0076 Boomerang Rd.
Aspen, CO 81611
Macromedia Products:
2 Macromedia Spectra 1.0, 2 ColdFusion Enterprise 4.5.1, 1 ColdFusion Studio, HomeSite, Flash 5
Hardware:
Compaq Proliant DL380 for Web site, Compaq dual-Xeon-processor server for database
Operating System
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 SP 6a
Database:
Microsoft SQL Server 7
Size of DB:
6+ GB
Development Team:
Three developers from MINDSEYE, one from Aspen Skiing Company
Site Traffic:
300,000 user sessions and 1 million page views per month
Development Team:
7 full-time developers
Macromedia Alliance Partner:
MINDSEYE, Inc.
Macromedia Services:
Bronze Support
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