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Determine your online inventory number, and consider contingency (for example, you might determine that if your on-hill capacity is 6000 skiers, you’ll only allocate 4500 for online inventory, reserving 1500 for other sales channels like call center and group sales, or last minute purchases). Perhaps it will fluctuate throughout the season, and you may add a buffer if you expect or experience a high rate of no-shows.
Determine how you want to distribute this online inventory among sub groups, if at all. A few examples outlined in this article include a single bucket for all access inventory, by product type, by consumer persona groups, and by time slot, but there are other options not explored here as well.
If you are going with the persona groups approach, determine what your persona groups are and how these map to products/product attribute combinations as in the example above. Then setup the inventory pools and map them to the relevant RTP and ecommerce access products.
If you are choosing an inventory strategy that isn’t “set it and forget it,” consider assigning someone the very important job of re-allocating inventory as more is known about pre-sales and upcoming restrictions, dates, etc, assuming that during the winter this will likely be a daily task.
If you don’t intend to limit sales of access products at all, still set up inventory pool(s) with an unreachable limit and map inventory pool(s) to your ecommerce access products, so that you have reporting and the ability to quickly ‘turn on’ inventory management in case you need to do so at any point during the 20/21 season.
Work with leadership to determine if your resort is doing passholder reservations and what rules you expect to enforce around passholder reservations. Contact your Aspenware representative as soon as you are aware of your desired strategy so they can confirm whether the passholder reservation development will support your desired business logic and start the set up process.
If you need support or help with setting up your Aspenware ecommerce products to integrate with RTP inventory pools, contact your Aspenware representative.