We had the opportunity to sit down with Aidan Kelly, CMO at Sun Peaks, and talk to him about all things Liftopia. A transcript of our interview is shown below.

Liftopia: Before we get into things, tell us a little bit about Sun Peaks.
Aidan: Sun Peaks Resort is located in the interior of British Columbia. It’s the second largest ski area in Canada, which many people don’t know, and seventh largest in North America. It’s three different mountains that all kind of funnel into a nice central ski through zone, so it’s a really good place and everyone should come and visit us!

Liftopia: What is your role at the ski area?  
Aidan: I’m the Chief Marketing Officer, so I oversee all of the marketing functions and sales functions within the resort.

Liftopia: What are the biggest benefits for you of partnering with Liftopia?
Aidan: I think just giving us the ability to drive as much advanced purchase revenue as we can. That’s obviously key in our business; it helps weatherproof things a little bit and gives us more predictability. That sort of dovetails into the dynamic pricing strategy.  Once we decided that we really wanted to capture as much advance purchase business as we could, then the way to best do that is through the dynamic pricing.

The secondary piece for us has been the service. The service from the team is really really good and it works out for us because we know that we have that level of expertise and support whenever we need it to keep the cash register ringing and skier visits growing.

Liftopia: What problems does Liftopia solve for you?
Aidan: It helps to provide a level of expertise that we don’t have internally. On a typical day we wear 30 or 40 different hats and just because you work in sales and marketing doesn’t mean that you’re not pulled into operational stuff on a regular basis. A lot of us are kind of generalists rather than experts in a specific area. Liftopia provides expertise and advice specific to e-commerce and helps us deliver what we need to the marketplace without having to have 100% of the knowledge ourselves. 

Liftopia: What’s your favorite hat to wear?
Aidan: It’s probably “product tester” 🙂 Whenever you show up to the office in the morning and there’s been a decent sized storm we always need photos for social media, video clips for the website, or just need to know what’s working well with the product for the guests to experience. 

Liftopia: How does data from Liftopia help you plan your operation?
Aidan: It’s quite helpful because the bigger percentage of advance purchase sales that we can get, the more predictable our business is in terms of different levels of demand. It can help you with everything from how many frontline staff to put on to managing your cost of goods sold, F&B, lift operations, etc. The list goes on and on. The more you know what your business will be ahead of time the easier it is to plan and operate your business and run it more efficiently from a cost perspective.