SnowTrax quietly launched as a comparative search and booking engine for ski vacations.
The website compares up to five ski resorts and their features at a time, shows airfares at nearby airports and hotels across multiple mountains, details the mileage from the hotel to ski lifts and bus stops, and presents inventory from ski travel vendors and online travel agencies.
And, unlike metasearch engines, such as Skyscanner which unveiled a trip-planning service for ski holidays, Bethesda, Md.-based SnowTrax serves as an OTA for the ski market and handles the bookings itself.
It also provides some ski inspiration — presenting ski package ideas and expert opinion to what SnowTrax labels Destination Agnostic Travelers — people who know they want to go skiing, but don’t know where to go.
Ski vacation, adventure travel and vacation rental providers all are considered part of the long tail of travel distribution. Namely, they are often forgotten or neglected as large players and intermediaries focus on major airlines, hotel chains and car rental companies.
So, how does SnowTrax access all of the disparate inventory which goes into a ski package?
SnowTrax President Joe Bous says the company accesses the inventory directly from suppliers, including hotels, ski resorts and vacation rental management companies, and from wholesalers, as well.
“Ski inventory comes into our availability engine via live XML feeds and inventory loaded into our Extranet,” Bous says. “Additional inventory, including lift tickets, ski rentals and ski instruction packages will be live soon, and thisis all sourced directly from ski resorts.”
SnowTrax goes the standards route and forsakes it, depending on the supplier.
“In the cases where the supplier uses the OpenTravel schema, we do use it,” Bous says. “Otherwise, we use whatever the supplier uses.”
The website lists a support phone number, but Bous says all inventory is booked online.
“One of the main differentiations between SnoTrax and the bulk of our competitors in the online ski space is that rather than displaying cached data, requiring users to dial into a call center or make a quote request, we display real-time pricing that can be booked on-site,” Bous says.
SnowTrax conducted a soft launch in September.
Its parent company is Airfare.com, an airline consolidator, and the two companies plan to do cross-selling.
Bous is the founder of Airfare.com.
Snow Trax have got a winner here with real time inventory access by the public and then make bookings while there. Plus added bonus of suggestions for the undecided.
First mover, to help the traveller get the best planning experience, gets the spoils.
All the best,
Ewen
Interesting, but don’t Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz also have real time inventory for ski vacations? Doesn’t Ski.com?
I wonder how SnowTrax is accessing inventory from property management companies, the key source of inventory in the U.S. ski market. Is there a direct link to their PMS? To the ISI link?
Bruce: Here are some answers to some of your questions from SnowTrax President Joe Bous:
“Currently, we connect to most of the property management companies via the switches provided by their software vendor. We do have direct links to inventory at many ski resorts that manage their own properties. Our goal is to streamline this over time.
“In regards to Ski.com, SnowTrax differentiates itself by:
- Providing destination inspiration tools based on tangible data and real time package pricing/availability
- Searching multiple destinations simultaneously for an apples-to-apples comparison
- Empowering users to judge the value of packages accurately through detailed data; we provide thoroughly researched distance from property to lift/bus shuttle stop; driving distance and time from multiple airport options to the resort, driving distance and time from hundreds of US cities to ski resorts in their area for road trips, and more.
- Continuously pursuing direct contracts with ski resort properties in order to offer a range of inventory to our users at each resort.
“As for the traditional OTAs, I would say that their ski focus is often just a repackaging of their traditional inventory/technology with little regard to the idiosyncrasies of the ski travel market. SnowTrax has a very niche focus and is able to offer tools and functionality specifically targeted to the ski traveler. A few examples, for reference:
- We offer prices/data on several airport options. For example, the user can decide if he/she will fly into Denver to ski Aspen for the lowest fare, or fly into Aspen for xx additional cost, which allows them to ski on the day of arrival (we call this the Vacation Optimizer..)
- If a user is viewing results at the Canyons, we mention driving distance or shuttle route access to nearby Park City mountains, showing the user the added value of the property being looking at.
- We specifically tailored the range of lodging options shown to each resort; so when a user is browsing Tahoe we allowed for Reno properties to show, since some travelers opt to lodge in Reno while skiing Tahoe, but made the search radius tighter at resorts where most options were onsite or nearby.”
After spending 20+ years in the ski industry and being a first mover for online ski vacation planning, this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I have to admit I spent just a few minutes on the SnowTrax site and am not real impressed. For example, I wanted to go from PHL-DEN to ski Breck, Vail or Aspen, and it offered me connections and a $2500/person package as option 1 for Breckenridge. I don’t think that included lift tickets or transfers. For Vail and Aspen I didn’t see options to fly to EGE or ASE. But maybe I didn’t spend enough time on the site. But if that’s my impression, what about consumers? While I’m intrigued by the concept, and I like the side by side comparisons, and the “if you like this resort, check out this resort” functionality (what is that based on?), it seems like the booking engine is in beta if not alpha at this point. Just sayin…
Thanks for checking out the site, we’re eager for any and all feedback as we roll out this season. We’ve got on-site solutions to your critiques, but it’s useful to know that we should probably tweak the execution so that users can quickly use and understand the site.
For the PHL -> Aspen, Breck, and Vail search, and for all searches, we default to fly you into the cheapest airport (DEN, in this case). You can view alternative options by clicking ‘edit’ on the matrix above all results, or on the left side filter panel – where you’ll find ASE, EGE, and more. In this space, we show you the drive time and lowest price to each airport option, giving you more data to play with in choosing your airport. In addition – we extract out the most ‘time saving’ flight choice on the trip card under ‘Vacation Optimizer’, in case you’re antsy to ski the day you land.
You make a good point that seeing a top trip card of $2500 pp is jarring. Our default sort order is not by cheapest price, it’s based on an algorithm factoring in proximity to lifts, star rating, and price. We may tweak this as well to minimize user confusion. There is, however, an option to sort by price.
The ‘if you like this resort’ suggestion is generated based on the user’s search choices, and our own internal research. So, if a user picks Sunday River, our system might suggest Smugglers’ Notch because both are internally ‘tagged’ as being both family-friendly and in the East. We’re hoping to eventually base this intelligence on historical user preferences, but we need to hit a critical mass of use before this is possible.
Thanks for your critique, keep checking it out through the season, we’re adding inventory and functionality daily.