A ski hill’s website has one job in October

The only two questions in October

Pull up the website of almost any ski hill in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia or Newfoundland in the middle of October and you will find the same thing: a full-width photo of a powder day from last February, a navigation bar with eleven items, and a news post about the summer bike park. Somewhere below that, if you keep scrolling, there might be a line about early-bird passes.

Now think about who is actually on that site in October. It is not someone browsing. It is a parent who skied there last year and wants to know if the early-bird deadline has passed. It is a university student in Fredericton or Halifax deciding between two hills. It is a family that just moved to the region and wants to know whether the place is any good and when it opens.

All of them are asking some version of two questions. When do you open? Can I buy a pass right now? Everything else on the site is noise until those are answered.

The hill knows this. The staff get the phone calls. The website just was not built to say it, because it was built once, in summer, by someone picturing the whole year at once.

Give the homepage three states

The single most useful change a hill can make is to stop treating the homepage as one fixed page. A ski hill has at least three distinct seasons from the visitor’s point of view, and the homepage should look different in each.

Pre-season (roughly October to opening day)

The first screen says the target opening date, or an honest “we open when the snow lets us, sign up and we’ll tell you first,” and a button that goes directly to pass purchase. Below that, the pass options with prices and the early-bird deadline in plain text. Then whatever is new this year: a lift, a lodge renovation, a rental fleet. That is the whole page.

Open (opening day to closing day)

The first screen becomes conditions: what is open, what the snow is like, what the weather is doing, and whether the hill is open today. Lift tickets and lessons move up. Passes move down but stay reachable.

Closed (spring to autumn)

The page says you are closed, when you expect to open next, and what you are doing in the meantime. If there is summer business (events, weddings, biking), lead with that. If there is not, keep it short and point people to the email list.

This does not require three websites. It requires a homepage built from blocks that a staff member can switch with a single setting, and a short checklist of which blocks go where in each season. On most modern platforms this is a day or two of setup, not a rebuild.

Conditions first, on a phone

Once you are open, the conditions page becomes the most visited page on the site, and nearly all of that traffic comes from a phone, usually in the morning, often in a car. It needs to load fast and answer in the first screen without pinching, scrolling or tapping into a PDF.

The minimum, in this order: open or closed today, hours, lifts running, trails or runs open, snow surface, and the weather at the base. Then the temperature at the summit, the date of the last snowfall, and a note from whoever groomed overnight if you can manage it. A single timestamp showing when the report was last updated matters more than any of the photos.

Two details that hills consistently get wrong:

• The report lives in a PDF or an image. Search engines cannot read it, screen readers cannot read it, and a phone cannot display it legibly. Put it in text.
• The report is updated through a process so clunky that staff stop updating it by mid-January. If updating conditions takes more than two minutes from a phone, it will not happen on a busy morning. Build the staff-side form for the person doing it at six in the morning.

Webcams are good. They are not a substitute for the text report, because someone deciding whether to make a ninety-minute drive from Moncton wants to know how many lifts are running, not what the parking lot looks like.

The pass sales flow

Pass sales are the pre-season’s revenue, and the checkout is where hills quietly lose money. The typical flow asks the buyer to create an account, enter the same address twice, choose from a grid of pass types with names only staff understand, and then upload a photo. Each step costs you a share of the people who started.

What a good flow looks like from the buyer’s side: choose the pass in plain language (adult, youth, child, senior, family), see the price and what it includes, enter payment, done. Photo and waiver can come by email afterward, or be collected at first visit. If your ticketing system cannot do this, that is worth knowing before you renew the contract.

Three things to check on your own site before the early-bird deadline:

1. Can a returning customer buy a pass on a phone in under a minute without looking anything up?
2. Does the price on the website match the price in the checkout, including tax?
3. If someone abandons the checkout, do they get an email reminding them before the deadline?

That third one is usually free in the ticketing platform and almost never turned on.

Snow-day email and SMS

A hill’s email list is its most valuable marketing asset and its most neglected one. The list should be doing two jobs, and most hills only do the first.

The first job is the seasonal rhythm: early-bird reminder, opening date announced, holiday hours, spring pass sale. Plan it in September and schedule it.

The second job is the snow day. When it dumps overnight, a short message by nine in the morning (“Twenty centimetres overnight, all lifts running, here’s the report”) will fill the parking lot in a way no ad campaign can. This works better by SMS than email, because the decision to go is made standing in the kitchen. Ask for mobile numbers at pass purchase, be clear that the texts are about snow and not promotions, and keep that promise.

Both lists should be collected on the website in the pre-season, when intent is highest. A single “tell me when you open” form on the pre-season homepage will outperform every pop-up you have ever tried.

What to measure

A hill does not need a dashboard with forty tiles. It needs a few numbers, checked weekly, that tell you whether the website is doing its job.

• Pass sales by week, against the same week last year. This is the only number that matters in October and November, and it should be on one chart that the GM sees every Monday.
• Conditions page views per open day, once the season starts, and how many of those came from a phone. A drop usually means the report has gone stale or the page has slowed down.
• Lift-ticket conversion: of the people who land on the ticket page, how many buy. If this falls when you change the page or the pricing, you will know within a week.
• Checkout abandonment on passes, and whether the reminder email recovers any of it.
• List growth in the pre-season, and the open rate on the snow-day messages.

These are all available from the ticketing platform and a basic analytics setup. The work is deciding to look at them, and agreeing in advance what you will change if they move.

What to do first

Open your own website on your phone, today, and pretend you are a family in Saint John deciding whether to buy a pass for this winter. Time how long it takes to find the opening date and get to a checkout. If the answer is more than two taps and thirty seconds, start there. Switch the homepage to a pre-season state, put the opening date and a pass button on the first screen, and add a “tell me when you open” form. Everything else can wait until the snow does.