So we have wanted to do this for a while… While we were back working at Hotwire.com, we noticed a funny thing. Online travel sites, ski sites, gear sites, etc, all have an interesting challenge – making customers aware of the best deals available on the site.
This is where deal feeds can be very helpful, as they open up a larger set of a companies inventory without requiring customers to “easter egg hunt” around for the best deals. There are some interesting strategies to get best deals across, a couple of our favorites are Steepandcheap.com and Woot.com (both function on a similar model). Steepandcheap (a Backcountry.com subsidiary) and Woot.com, list one deal at a time until that deal sells out. This allows them to focus on one piece of distressed inventory for customers, and both companies make great use of deal feeds to broadcast these around.
In our case, we have some amazing lift ticket and ski package deals, however it is difficult to get all of those deals across to our customer base.
So we decided to just open up our deals to you via a massive set of RSS and HTML lift ticket deal feeds. Now, that page may not look too sharp, but it holds a HUGE amount of data that doesnt require much digging around the Liftopia site. You can slice and dice this data as you like, whether you want an RSS feed of all the best lift ticket deals at a time (these are the best deals for each of our resort products available in the next two weeks, based on % savings), by region (again best deal in next two weeks per resort) or by resort. Resort pages, like this RSS feed for Wildcat, list all deals for the rest of the season.
You can browse all of the regions’ and resorts’ lift ticket feeds, or you can pick your favorite regions/resorts and keep an eye on them.
So what does this mean? Well, it means that you can have a better handle on Liftopia ticket deals for the places you are interested in. These feeds update daily, so when resorts adjust price points, you are the first to see them. Want a quick list of the best deals in New England? Check out the RSS or HTML deal feed for New England. Who knows, maybe you will do a better job organizing these deals than we do!
We hope this makes finding deals easier on Liftopia, and please let us know if you have any feedback.
Filed under: About Liftopia, How does it work? | Tagged: Deals, lift ticket deals, rss feeds, Ski, Skiing
