Super Bowl – A great day to ski or snowboard

Posted on February 2, 2010 by liftopia

I dont know about you, but I typically use the Super Bowl as an opportunity to be lazy without excuse, sit around, eat large quantities of food, and prior to that I typically just wait.. to eat large quantities of food.

This year, why not ski on Super Bowl Sunday (February 7th for those of you who aren’t sports fiends). Liftopia is running its 3rd annual Super Bowl Ski Lift Ticket Sale, with discounts to ski resorts all over North America.  While we are highlighting the Top 44 Lift Ticket Deals (for Super Bowl 44), there are even more here.

For many of these deals, there are limited quantities, and they truly are selling out fast.  The way I look at it, why not get out and have some fun on the slopes before you settle in to watch the game.  You can still eat a lot, you just wont feel as guilty. Here is a quick list of the amazing lift ticket savings for Sunday, February 7th:

New England: Up to 48% off (also, did you we now have Stowe lift tickets?)

Colorado: Up to 51% off (going fast, used to be 55% off!)

Lake Tahoe: 41% off at several resorts

Utah: Snowboard or ski for 33% off

New York/New Jersey: over 50% off

Pennsylvania: up to 38% off

Idaho: these are new, 33% off

Michigan: up to 41% off

Montana/Wyoming: up to 52% off

British Columbia: up to 35% off

New Mexico: 25% off

West Virginia: get this, ski for only $17.99

Wisconsin: 24% off

Quebec: save up to 32%

You get the picture, and either way, have fun before catching the game, we’ll see you out there!

Super Bowl Ski Lift Ticket Sale

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Liftopia launches lift ticket deal alerts, use them to win $500 in lift tickets

Posted on December 11, 2009 by liftopia

Hey Everyone,

We have a really exciting new feature on the Liftopia.com site today.  Many many people are searching for discount lift tickets this season, and many of you have asked us “why cant you just let me know when some deals show up for my favorite ski areas?”
Well, here they are, Liftopia Ski Deal Alerts – simply sign up for your favorite regions and we’ll let you know when the best deals show up.

To promote this new feature, we are having a fun holiday giveaway.  Simply email, tweet, blog about, or share the following link and sign up for a ski deal alert on Liftopia.com and you’ll be entered to win $500 in lift tickets on Liftopia.com.  http://bit.ly/513YeA

Happy Holidays!

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Best in the West Lift Ticket Deals (post turkey day)

Posted on November 30, 2009 by liftopia

Hey everyone,  hope you had a great holiday, it sure was nice to have some turkey, stuffing, and all things calorie-heavy last week.

While the east coast is still waiting on a cold snap and more snow, there are many areas out west that have great ski conditions, and below are some of the best discount lift ticket deals available this week.  There are a bunch of new resorts, and keep an eye on our site as more will be loading in the next week or two.

Colorado Lift Ticket Deals

Utah Lift Ticket Deals

Idaho Lift Tickets

Wyoming Lift Tickets

New Mexico Lift Tickets

California Lift Tickets (including So Cal and Lake Tahoe)

Alberta lift tickets and British Columbia lift tickets

Have fun out there!

 

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First accumulation of ski deals of the season

Posted on November 6, 2009 by liftopia

Hey everyone,

Have you been out on the hill yet? If so, I am jealous and hope you had fun out there.
With several resorts already open, and others to open this weekend (like Copper Mountain), we are starting to see a trickle of 09/10 lift ticket deals on Liftopia.com.  Thank you for your patience while we help the resorts get things loaded, and until then, here is a snapshot of some of the first early season ski deals on our site (some are pretty cheap!).

Colorado Lift Ticket Deals

  • Copper Mountain this weekend for $45 (31% off)
  • Loveland this weekend for $29.99 (35% off)
  • Arapahoe Basin on Monday for $39.99 (18% off) Also, December 1 for $20
  • Monarch on November 25th for $43.99 (19% off) Also, December 10th for $12.99, very limited
  • Winter Park on November 26th for $75 (19% off)
  • Sunlight on December 4th for $28.99 (42% off)
  • Ski Cooper on December 1 for $34.99 (17% off)

New England: Vermont Lift Tickets, New Hampshire Lift Tickets, Massachusetts Lift Tickets

California Lift Tickets/Nevada Lift Tickets

Utah Lift Tickets

  • Snowbird Early Season Special, most days until December 24th for $39.99 (44% off)
  • Canyons on November 27th for $44.99 (43% off)
  • Brian Head on December 7th for $24.99 (44% off)
  • Brighton on December 1st for $39.99 (31% off)

Idaho Lift Tickets

Quebec Lift Tickets

New York Lift Tickets

Wyoming Lift Tickets

Minnesota Lift Tickets

Michigan Lift Tickets

New Mexico Lift Tickets

British Columbia Lift Tickets

Wisconsin Lift Tickets

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Why arent there more deals on Liftopia right now?

Posted on October 12, 2009 by liftopia

Well hello there!  Judging by how many of you have been emailing us, and how many searches we are seeing come through on Liftopia.com, we figured it might be good to explain why there are only a handful available right now.
This is a funny time of year for all of us in the ski biz.  The weather changes, the snow starts showing up, and in some cases (like Arapahoe Basin and Loveland), you are already spinning your ski lifts to die hard early season skiers. For Lifotpia, resorts load tickets and prices directly into our system, so we do our best to help them do so as easily as possible.

For many resorts, this is the last period of time that they are deciding on what the ticket prices are going to be for the season.  This makes it especially difficult to come up with the “right” prices to offer at this time of year through Liftopia.  Some resorts (aka, the Colorado Ski Resorts already mentioned), already have some ideas on what their on-mountain prices are, but are very busy making sure their early season customers are happy.  Others, like Alpine Meadows in California (who we just talked with today), still have several weeks before they release their on-mountain tickets.

The good news, is we have talked with many resorts in the past few days, and many more will be loading tickets into Liftopia soon, so keep an eye out!  It has been awesome to see, however, the number of people searching for lift tickets on our site already.  This is the first season ever that Liftopia has sold lift tickets in September, and in the first 5 days of October alone, there were 2,500+ searches for lift ticket deals on our site!
Thanks for your patience while we work with our resort partners to load tickets, and we are just as excited as you are to start our season.  For those of you lucky enough to be in Colorado, have fun out on the slopes!

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Some details behind Liftopia’s Series B funding

Posted on October 5, 2009 by liftopia

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.

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Dynamic Pricing Creeps in to Baseball

Posted on May 26, 2009 by liftopia

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.

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Mammoth Mountain, Liftopia’s Newest Partner

Posted on April 13, 2009 by liftopia

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.

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Liftopia on Techcrunch

Posted on March 11, 2009 by liftopia

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.

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Tamarack Resort Shutters Its Doors

Posted on March 5, 2009 by liftopia

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.

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