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Schumann Resorts

Located in the beautiful Okanagan valley, Big White Ski Resort and Silver Star Mountain Resort are two of the largest ski resorts in British Columbia. Owned by Schumann Resorts, they were voted Family Ski Resort of the Year and Best Small Resort of the Year respectively by The Good Skiing & Snowboarding Guide. The resorts were still relatively undiscovered outside of their local markets, and Schumann had the challenge of revamping their marketing materials to effectively capture the essence of their attractions. Big White offers a modern alpine village and ultimate mountain experience, while Silver Star’s fairy-tale Victorian village radiates fun and excitement for the whole family.

With so many skiers and snowboarders around the world looking at resort websites to find the best experience, Schumann recognized the importance of investing time and money towards creating world-class websites that would support their traditional marketing activities. Their goal was an information piece with “cool” interactive elements to keep people coming back.

Furthermore, their traditional marketing materials — including their branding, international brochures, advertisements, and POS materials — needed to be revised in order to attract new customers.

Solution

The websites needed to offer a highly interactive environment to promote them to the masses. The goal was to provide real-time weather reports, lift status, park status, grooming reports, and some of the Internet’s most extensive virtual tours ever created for a resort. Careful planning had to go into the information architecture of the websites to ensure the navigation was clear and easy for visitors to use. With hundreds of pages of content to manage, Hot Tomali made the entire system database-driven so that Schumann Resorts could add and reorganize content as needed.

The main feature of the virtual tours on the Big White website is TELUS Park. This interactive park tour provides a first-person tour of the terrain park that’s reminiscent of a “choose your own adventure” game. This tool allows people to browse the actual runs on Big White 24/7, 365 days a year, which is great for international customers who rely on the Internet as a key factor in their decision-making process.

Promotion of the websites was supported through POS posters that — through the use of conceptual imagery and extensive studio retouching — showed how the websites were even more realistic than ever before. Environmental signage was also used as a non-traditional guerrilla marketing tactic to drive web traffic, and all of Big White’s and Silver Star’s international brochures were overhauled by Hot Tomali.

Results

• During the time Hot Tomali’s websites have been live, all attendance, retail, rental and ticket sales records have been broken
• Both resorts have achieved record attendance and their largest ever one-day skier visits
• The websites have attracted over 16.875 million unique web visitors
• The websites have served more than 55 million pageviews
• The mountain tours have served more than half a million virtual tours
• BigWhite.com won gold at the 2007 Canadian e-Tourism Awards
• SkiSilverStar.com won silver at the 2007 Canadian e-Tourism Awards