Online Inventory for Lift Access
- Jenni Buonanni
Strategically sell lift products with added inventory for the 20/21 season
Executive Summary
Set up inventory on access products even if you don’t expect to need to limit capacity this winter.
How to determine your online inventory, which can be used when setting up inventory pools that access products sold online can be linked to.
Different options for bucketing access inventory allocations:
Using product groups
Using “persona groups” for inventory pool groupings tied to access products and why you might use this method rather than a simple lift ticket/passholder delineation.
Using time slots for controlling congestion at the start of the day
If you have any questions about inventory pools and how they work in Aspenware Commerce, contact your Aspenware Service representative for a refresher and help thinking through your resort’s inventory strategy.
If you need to be nimble with resort operations and capacity restrictions this year, Aspenware recommends adding inventory to access products, and any products that are bundled with access products, for the 2020 season before they go on sale. Leveraging Aspenware’s inventory integrations into your POS inventory management can be useful to actually restrict access if it comes to that, but more importantly, it can help resorts plan for and quickly adapt to challenges and opportunities that may arise during this unprecedented winter.
The methods and philosophies for managing inventory are shifting toward concepts used in the hotel and airline industries, which have always had to manage limited inventory, and therefore have learned to maximize their revenue within those constraints. Aspenware recommends coming up with your total “online inventory” as a first step.
Determining Online Inventory
Your “online inventory” is a subset of your overall availability, or max resort capacity, which is the number of permitted on-hill skiers and riders. Your Online Inventory is the capacity available after the following are deducted: 1) inventory you need to reserve for tickets that will be sold through sales channels that aren’t directly integrated into your POS' inventory system, 2) partner programs (IKON, Epic Pass, etc.), 3) passholder visits if you won’t require passholder reservations, 4) anything else you need to reserve inventory for, such as tickets you want to keep available until more is known closer to the season.
This online inventory can be tracked and managed for online sales at a high level using your POS’ inventory functionality - Aspenware commerce directly integrates to your resort POS’ inventory. Resorts requiring reservations for passholders experienced “no shows,” so consider over-allocating inventory for certain inventory buckets, like passholders. Perhaps start the season with accurate inventory limits, and pad inventory numbers for certain product types once more is known about no-shows at your resort.
Adding an overall inventory pool to access products
If you desire to keep access inventory pool setup and maintenance as simple as possible, consider creating an overall inventory pool with the daily inventory equal to your “Online Inventory” number(s) and add that to every access product you sell online, mapping it in RTP and in Aspenware Commerce. If you don’t plan to restrict inventory but want to put it on as a fail safe, as Aspenware is recommending all resorts do at a minimum, that online inventory can be a very high number for initial sales, but should be added to all access products in preparation for this unprecedented season.
A deeper look at access inventory pools
Resorts likely want to have more control over online access product availability than “all on” or “all off” so that they can re-allocate inventory across different channels as more is known about pre-sales and the season. Once “online inventory” is determined, define buckets of inventory that access products will be mapped to, and possibly allocate a percentage to each bucket. Furthermore, resort admins who want to rebalance inventory by individual date will need to configure inventory pool limits for each date of the season.
Having this level of inventory pool management added to lift products could be as simplistic as three access inventory pools for lift, parking, and passholder reservations, and lift products are mapped to the lift inventory, parking reservations are limited by parking inventory, and passholder reservation products are mapped to the passholder inventory pools. The downsides of going with this approach is that all lift tickets have the same inventory limits, and so do all passholders, so if you have special discount lift tickets that you want to restrict inventory on more than your full priced day tickets, you couldn’t set different inventory levels for each. You also may have different rules across different passholder types that would constitute different passholder inventory pools, an example of this would be if weekend passholders should only have weekend dates available, and unlimited passholders should be able to book into all dates.
In the Vail Resorts’ announcement around passholder reservations, their strategy indicates that they are allocating separate inventory for passholders from ticket-holders. Their strategy for rolling out inventory to passholders is different from their strategy for ticket-holders. Vail is giving limited early and unrestricted access to passholders pre-season, then making dates available for the coming week during the season to passholders. Your resort could implement a similar strategy, and inventory pools separated by tickets and pass reservations would be necessary in rolling out this strategy in Aspenware Commerce.
Persona group inventory management
For resort admins who want to move inventory around between different “persona groups”, depending on how much is consumed for particular dates, may be a different and compelling way to think about grouping inventory so that you can make certain products available to a variety of different consumer types on different days of the week, month, or holiday period.
Airlines use this concept in how they plan for leisure vs. business travellers. Leisure travellers typically book in advance and are looking for greater discounts, while business travellers likely purchase their flights close to their trip and are less price conscious.
Airlines want to sell out and maximize the number of guests who will pay full price, so they make some seats available at discounted rates for leisure travellers but also reserve enough seats for last minute business travellers who will pay full price. They also have a separate “line” of products for business travellers. Consumer persona groups will look different from resort to resort, and season to season. Here are some examples of persona groups in the ski context and how to apply these to inventory pool groupings.
Persona Group | Potential Access Product Mix | Lifecycle Considerations |
 Local Passholder (Passholder) |
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 Local Non-Passholder (Day Tickets) |
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 Travelling Non-Passholder/Group (Discount Tickets) |
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 Travelling Passholder (Pass Programs) |
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In this example, the persona group maps to the inventory group
Local Passholder - Passholder
Local Non-Passholder - Day Tickets
Travelling Non Passholder/Group - Discount Tickets
Travelling Passholder - Pass Programs
An inventory pool may not map 1:1 to an ecommerce product in Aspenware Commerce. An ecommerce product can map to multiple inventory pools dependent on attribute selections, and multiple products can map to a single inventory pool.
Extending the example inventory pools from above, here’s how these inventory pools might be mapped to products or product attribute combinations.
So why would a resort go with a model like this rather than the straightforward ticket and passholder inventory grouping? If the resort admin wants to incrementally “roll out” single day tickets and passholder reservations (which appeal to the local non-passholder who can purchase last minute) but keep multi day tickets and frequency card day reservations available further in advance, separate inventory pools for 1 day (Day Tickets) and 2-7 day/frequency card reservations (Discount tickets) would allow this. If your resort wanted to maximize the number of full priced tickets sold on certain days, restricting passholder reservations the day before those dates by limiting the Passholder Inventory pool (assuming this is allowed in the terms and conditions for your passes), could allow this. More granular inventory pools also allow the resort admin to re-distribute inventory for certain dates as you watch pre-sales come in.
If you want to ensure that guests taking private lessons had their own dedicated inventory reserved only for them up until the week before the date, you could ensure that the discount ticket inventory group had more inventory than day tickets up until one week prior and then re-distribute some inventory from discount tickets to day tickets.
The downside to this level of inventory management is that an admin will need to carefully monitor, and modify, inventory levels each day, if the resort wants to rebalance inventory depending on how many slots remain for each inventory pool group.
Time Slot Inventory Pools
If you are worried about arrival congestion, another option for setting up inventory pools would be to create inventory pools for different arrival times that all of your access products map to. Guests would choose their arrival time (say 11:00 am) as an attribute on a product and that would decrement the 11:00 am inventory pool for all access products that have that arrival time available.
The down sides of this are that all product types are treated the same and pull from the same inventory pool likely, (to do arrival time inventory pools for by product groups would be possible, but very difficult to manage, requiring a lot of re-balancing). The largest downside perhaps is the amount of product setup in RTP required for this. Every time slot for every product header would need to be a separate product header in RTP, so depending on the number of time slots you intend to open, you could be multiplying, if not tripling or quadrupling, your product administration. This may make sense if being considered alongside an approach of simplifying your lift offering, such as only offering single day tickets and fewer age breaks.
Next steps
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.