Some details behind Liftopia’s Series B funding

Just recently, we announced that Liftopia secured its Series B round of funding, a big thanks to @jasonkincaid for a solid writeup in Techcrunch.

So what does this new round of investment mean for Liftopia? Well, it is all about continuing to build a platform that helps unite ski resorts with customers that want to get out on the hill more often. We are now entering into our 4th season of selling discount lift tickets online, and the progress throughout our first three seasons alongside this new bunch of capital means we can put our best foot forward in improving our service. We still have a lot of work ahead to improve our site for all of the folks that use it, and we will be investing in our site development to make sure it helps people get out on the hill more often.

This season you’ll see a lot of new things on our site, some which are already live (we launched a redesign of our site about a month ago), and many which you’ll notice as the season approaches. We are committed to making it as easy as possible for our customers to find the deals that are available, so keep an eye out for features like RSS Ski Deal Feeds for your favorite resorts, as well as other ways to stay on top of the best deals. Lastly, we will continue to work hard to add more resort partners, and it is looking like there will be many new options for you to check out this season.

Raising this round has been a lot of work itself, but we are very excited to put these new funds to work to improve our site for skiers, riders, and resorts alike.

Dynamic Pricing Creeps in to Baseball

It has been very interesting in the past few months to see dynamic pricing (or yield management, revenue management, etc) start to be utilized in more industries.
Given that this is what Liftopia does for ski resorts, it is very refreshing to see these best practices being applied within other areas.  The airlines, hotel industry, and casinos are famous for utilizing demand-based pricing, and now we are seeing it in dynamic toll pricing (in cities such as London and Stockholm), variably-priced museum entrance fees, and the most recent and higher profile dynamically priced baseball tickets being tested by the San Francisco Giants.

Increasing the efficiency of pricing can accomplish several things.  In the case of tolls and museums, it is often to balance load against capacity (aka, giving people incentive to avoid rush hour and drive when the roads are less busy), but in the case of the Giants, ski resorts, and travel, the concept typically is about generating incremental business without compromising or diluting existing customers.  With Liftopia, for example, we put up restrictions/fences for consumers (advance purchase, date-specific, non-refundable tickets at limited quantity). It appears that the Giants are using it primarily for close-in sales.  Online travel sites like Hotwire and Priceline do a great job of using this concept, because they also require fences for customers to jump over in order to access deals that are better than on Expedia or “non-opaque” travel sites.  For those of you who havent used them, Hotwire and Priceline offer blind-buy models, where consumers trade flexibility in committing to unknown hotels or airline routes in exchange for deep discounts.

It will be interesting to see how dynamic Qcue’s (www.qcue.net, the company powering the Giants’ dynamic ticket pricing) system is, and more importantly how well it drives incremental profits for the franchise.  It does, however, seem to make sense to vary prices based on demand (after all, some games are much more popular than others, due to weather, the team playing, the pitcher starting, etc), and we applaud the Giants for jumping in to the yield managment game.

Mammoth Mountain, Liftopia’s Newest Partner

We are really pumped to announce the addition of Mammoth Mountain to Liftopia.com. They just came on board over the weekend (after a LOOOONG time in the making), but it was worth the wait. We have some sick discount lift ticket deals, where we have mid-week tickets for only $59 (their on-mountain price is $83… I’m no mathematician but I believe that comes to a savings of $24 per ticket).

Plus, as an added bonus, everyone who books their Mammoth Mountain tix through Liftopia can save an add’l 30% on their on-mountain lodging.You just gotta enter the secret code on your Liftopia voucher.

Plenty of snow still up there to go around, so before you hang up your gear for the summer be sure to check em out.

Liftopia on Techcrunch

So we have been based in the Bay Area for the entire life span of Liftopia.  Throughout that time, we have attended various entrepreneurial events down in the valley, and inevitably have seen the rise of many neat companies.  One of the great wins out in SV, is to be featured in Techcrunch, and we are happy to say Liftopia received a great writeup yesterday.

Jason Kincaid does an awesome job explaining how Liftopia functions, and helps folks really understand the story behind our company’s growth.  It is great to have Jason accurately portray our model, despite not being a skier himself.  This makes us feel comfortable that our business makes sense, and hopefully we can turn Jason in to a skier or snowboarder at some point soon (come on, it isnt so bad to be up in the mountains!).

Obviously getting written up here is far from being a stamp of success (one can note their long list of written-about-but-now-defunct companies in their Deadpool).  It is, however, great to have a tech blog recognize that we can be innovative in a space that isnt exactly considered to be cutting edge.  We still have a lot of work to do, but we hope we can help broaden the business for ski companies, and bring more people in to the sport.  Great job Jason, let us know if you ever want to get out on the snow with us.

Tamarack Resort Shutters Its Doors

Tamarack Resort (in Tamarack, ID) has officially shut down all ski operations. I remember first hearing about this resort sometime in  2005 when they started playing radio ads on KFOG, our local San Francisco radio station. It was really interesting to see this aggressive new resort pop onto the scene out of nowhere and immediately start targeting folks in Lake Tahoe’s backyard. Ballsy. Definitely caught my attention.

But then, the stories and rumors coming out of there weren’t so hot. Never really knew what to believe or not, but they always seemed to be in big financial trouble and biting off a bit more than they could chew. Andre Aggasi and Steffi Graf in the mix? Then the real estate bubble bursts, then the credit markets dry up… and it ends up being a really crappy time to try and open a luxury resort from scratch.

Here’s a story from the AP that sums up the current situation pretty well.

Condolences and best of luck to all of the employees who got cut loose.  Let’s hope these types of stories don’t become more frequent.

QTJXDW9RFMFU

Twittering ski deals in your favorite region

Tweet Tweet!  With folks like John Stewart talking about Twitter, you know this thing has hit the main stream.  Many of you may remember the Liftopia Twitter account, which is gaining some momentum slowly in followers.  This is a great way for folks to find out about all things here at Liftopia headquarters… but what about deals in YOUR region.

I mean, it is all well and good if Liftopia has a lift ticket deal to Park City next week, but it doesn’t help you if you are interested in New York ski resorts, Michigan ski resorts, or any other place that doesn’t have easy access to ski resorts in Utah (unless you have a private jet, but something tells me if you do, you aren’t buying on Liftopia).
We wanted to come up with region-specific Liftopia Twitter accounts, so that if you only want to hear about deals in New Mexico and Quebec, you can do so.  Here is the list, and hope these help you find some more great ticket deals.

• Our main Twitter account: http://twitter.com/Liftopia
• Colorado: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_Co
• Lake Tahoe: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_Tahoe
• Michigan: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_MI
• Wyoming/Montana: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_WY_MT
• New Mexico: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_NM
• New York/New Jersey: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_NY_NJ
• Pennsylvania: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_PA
• Quebec: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_QC
• Utah: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_Utah
• West Virginia: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_WV
• Southern California: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_SoCal
• New England: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_NE
• British Columbia/Alberta: http://twitter.com/Liftopia_BC_AB
  

Enjoy!

New Resort Partners on Liftopia – Alpine Meadows, Homewood, Sunday River, and Sugarloaf

This is the best part of our job, when a resort we’ve been working on for months (or more often at this point, years) decides to come on board as a partner of Liftopia.com.

There’s only a finite number of resorts out there – last count it was something like 470 in the US, and so as you can imagine it’s not so much a question of bandwidth for reaching out and getting new partners up on the site. Some resorts take just one call, others take years and years of pitching. Either way, when that resort does finally decide to take the leap and come on board, it’s a sweet moment.

We are particularly pumped about this new group of resort partners because they hit (literally) close to home. As of this morning, we are now partnered with Alpine Meadows and Homewood, both in Lake Tahoe, both personal favorites of ours (we are based in San Fran, and so we hit them up a ton). And in New England, we now have Sunday River and Sugarloaf offering some killer 2-day passes. Evan grew up in Mass and went to school in Maine, and these were his spots growing up.

Check out these new deals when you get the chance, and please help us spread the word about these great new partners. We should (fingers crossed) be adding a few more solid resorts sometime later this week or early next week, so stay tuned…

New Cat Skiing Deals on Liftopia

So over here at Liftopia we are always working to add new deals to our site.  We recently have added a fun one, a little different than our typical resorts.  San Juan Skiing Company operates a cat skiing outfit out of Durango (their desks are located at Purgatory at Durango ski resort, ond of our partners).  For those of you who arent familiar with cat skiing, it is an amazing way to get out and enjoy fresh, untouched snow, and offers a “Heli-Skiing” like experience but at a much more affordable level.

The folks at San Juan Ski Company have loaded some amazing cat skiing deals on Liftopia, including a trip this Friday for $180.  The seat normally costs $325, so that represents a 45% savings.  This is an awesome opportunity to get out with an awesome cat skiing company (by the way, they offer an amazing amount of terrain, with exclusive access to about 35,000 acres).

Here is a link to the deal for Friday, and here is a link for all of the deals that San Juan Ski Company has on cat skiing seats.

New Partner Resorts!!

We’re pumped to announce the addition of some awesome new resort partners on Liftopia.com.

First off, let’s all give a warm “bienvenue!” to Mont Tremblant!

Then coming in all the way from Alta, Wyoming, let’s give it up for the “Best Snow in North America”…. Grand Targhee! (by the way, these guys are not messing around with their deals – I found some tickets in March for over 40% off)

And boasting one of the best terrain parks you’ll find ANYWHERE, we are very proud to announce the addition of Copper Mountain, coming in with a sick lift ticket + rental combo more than 25% off!

For all you California folks, we’re hoping to unveil a few new exciting partners in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned…

Tahoe finally gets some snow…

Now, working for Liftopia you’d think we would get more days out on the hill.  It has been a light year (have been working hard!), but a big storm came to Tahoe this weekend.  Our camera isnt exactly high def, but you can check out some of the day from Alpine Meadows below…

Editing courtesy of our friend Rob W.