Vail Resorts has partnered with search agency iCrossing to develop and launch Snow.com, which serves as an entry point for all of the Vail Resorts mountain resorts: Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone in Colorado; and Heavenly, on the California/Nevada border.
Elizabeth Lee, director of online marketing and sales for Vail Resorts, said that the goal of the launch was to create a better prospecting tool for customers and to increase search engine optimization through paid search.
“We are a brand that a lot of people already know about, so we wanted to target those who were searching online more generally for a Colorado ski vacation,” she said.
“From the search perspective we’re all about design for visibility and informed design,” added Stephen Thompson, SVP and executive creative director for iCrossing. “It’s a given that we’re good in natural search and optimizing sites but now we’re also using search data to inform our personas and development down to the granular copy of the site. This will help broaden our footprint based on what people are searching for.”
Thompson explained that iCrossing used a “pageless design,” meaning most information was made available on the homepage navigation bar.
“The user will feel the majority of the content is being delivered without drilling down multiple layers,” he said. “A lot of content is surface within the billboard area before asking a person to click out. It feels as if the site is serving up content almost dynamically, per a user’s choice.”
The site includes terrain status and weather updates, vacation planning tools and other resort information. Snow.com also drives users to each of the five resorts’ own separate, more specific informational sites. The site is also being promoted through display media on travel and weather sites as well as sites within the skiing vertical.
