Will Pre-Season Website Traffic Translate to Visits on the Mountain?

First Trax

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WE SURE HOPE SO!!!

Our team is busy posting all of the new events, what’s new at the resorts, sponsors, contests and additional content into the new website, so when you’re visiting our new TRIP PLANNER content, keep checking back as we’re plugging all of that new content in there daily.  The trip planner content is featuring all of the best lodging, dining, ski & snowboard rentals, shopping experiences, nightlife and more. So if you revisit those pages one day, you’re likely to see new information in there on yet another day.

Be sure to visit each of the individual ski resort content pages for more information on new features this season and the trip planner links, as well as other featured advertisers.  There are tons of great choices to make your getaway a great one!

You can also visit the MAIN Trip Planner page by clicking here: Ski Resort Trip Planner

NUMBERS, NUMBERS, NUMBERS

I was doing some server maintenance today and clicked over to the LOGS DIRECTORY to find them full of log files in the hundreds of thousands of bytes each. We’re talking simple TEXT files that are generated by the server that enable programs like Urchin and Google Analytics to track visitorship, page views and more.  Prior to cleaning those out, we ran an updated tracking report and found that 49,000+ unique visitors a day hit the site since last week! …in OCTOBER.  Nearly, 440,000 pages were viewed YESTERDAY.  Again – on a ski website – in October.

We are stoked!  Will that visitorship translate to on-mountain visits?  More to the point – HOW does that traffic translate to on-mountain visits?  The answer is certainly, who knows, but If that traffic continues to hold through early November, we’re looking 1.5 MILLION visitors in the first month of ski season – when ski season traditionally doesn’t even start until Thanksgiving!  That would certainly be an early season record here at SkiSoutheast.com-land.

Perhaps there’s a "pent up" need to ski and ride since it now appears that people made fewer trips to the mountain last season.  More accurately some who would normally ski three or four times had to cut back to one to three trips, etc. We can tell you that are LOT of people are looking right now and we’ve had more phone calls than I can remember from travel agencies looking for packages to share with their potential clients.

We’ve heard from a few people who are planning on offering a "to hell with the recession" discount promotion for lodging, dining, shopping and more. Business owners are amazingly flexible and always find a way to do business.  I’d expect some aggressive discounts and promotions across the board if things don’t start out like gang-busters early on in the season.  However, if fall-leaf-color bookings are any indication, things should go pretty well for the upcoming ski and snowboarding season. 

One industry insider that asked me to keep his name out of this story shared that he feels that this upcoming ski and snowboarding season will probably show numbers that are comparable to the current college football season.  If the weather holds and we get our normal amount of cold and snow, he claims that we’ll probably see a season that will provide numbers that once the season is said and done – will be about 8% off in terms of skier visits.  That is a sentiment that many, major college football programs – even in the hardcore SEC – are expressing and experiencing right now.  Most of the Southeastern Conference programs are experiencing an 8-10% decrease in attendance and they are blaming most of it on the economy. 

Of course one of the major differences in football and the ski & snowboarding industry is that of the weather.  If we get a lot of snow, it will excite people like nothing else and they will find a way to hit the mountain.

If our own early traffic numbers are any signal whatsoever, there’s a lot of people WANTING to visit their favorite mountains this season.  We can hope that God will be with us and we’ll get a great winter season that provides sufficient cold and snow to make this one successful even in the face of a difficult economy.

So…let’s start now…THINK and PRAY for COLD AND SNOW. It’s never too early to do so!

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