Mt. Hood Meadows
Creating an intuitive eCommerce experience with dynamic pricing for a premier mountain resort in the Pacific Northwest.
Since 1968, Mt. Hood Meadows has offered some of the most spectacular skiing and snowboarding in the northwest.
Services & Technology
The Challenge
Revamping a decades-old website for today’s skiers and snowboarders
Mt. Hood Meadows’ eCommerce experience was in need of a revamp. The legacy website was built with a custom design tightly coupled to its CMS, resulting in complex, time-consuming front-end updates for the internal team. The cart functionality—also custom—needed to be upgraded with a more modern out-of-the-box solution to ensure long-term configurability and security.
For customers, the process of purchasing lift tickets and renting equipment on the site needed to be faster and more intuitive. The decades-old UX/UI was slow, cumbersome, and not mobile friendly, resulting in frustrated skiers and snowboarders, not to mention significant pressure on the customer support team.
Discovery
Going onsite to understand the resort’s pain points and improvement opportunities
Surrounded by magnificent views of the Cascade Range, Codal conducted an onsite Discovery with the Mt. Hood Meadows team, where we learned about the resort’s pain points, unique product logic, business rules, and current system architecture.
After breaking the ice, no pun intended, we dove right in—nailing down the project’s short- and long-term goals, along with our immediate action items for Discovery. Key activities included:
Stakeholder interviews
Competitive analysis
User journey mapping
Feature ideation
Future-state architecture visualization
Development
Modernizing the experience of purchasing lift tickets, renting equipment, and more
Codal redesigned the Mt. Hood Meadows website from the ground up. Here were some of the key UX/UI updates:
Placing the eCommerce experience front and center
The old site focused on resort services, activities, events, and other content—while the process of purchasing tickets and equipment stood as its own separate experience. The new site blends these two pieces together, putting visitors immediately on the path to purchase—while also highlighting valuable content—once they land on the homepage.
Consolidating multiple products into a single PDP with different product variants
Historically, tickets for different age groups were sold as separate products, meaning customers had to scroll through a long list of options to find the right one for them. Now, the customer simply chooses between five different ticket types. For example, when the customer wants to purchase a Value Pass, they just click on that PDP, select their age range and desired add-ons, then proceed to checkout.
Moving the customer details form and liability agreement to a single cart page
Rather than having to fill out a form and sign an agreement on multiple PDPs, customers can add numerous tickets and rental equipment to their cart, then provide all necessary information for each item at checkout. For customers with a Mt. Hood Meadows account, this information will be pre-populated. And the checkout button doesn’t become clickable until all required information has been entered.
Enabling dynamic pricing for daily lift tickets
The price of a daily lift ticket fluctuates depending on time of year and day of the week. For example, weekends are often more expensive than weekdays. Pricing is also determined by the volume of tickets sold—so if tickets for a particular day are selling quickly, the price increases accordingly. The new PDPs automatically display the correct price, based on complex business logic that we developed on the back end. This logic is very similar to flight booking. Daily prices are displayed on a calendar, nudging customers to book days that are less crowded and expensive. This improves the customer experience—since all skiers and snowboarders prefer smaller crowds and shorter lift lines—and helps bring in more business on less popular days.
Building custom UI components and templates on Strapi
Our team designed unique front-end elements for the Resort Services, Events & Activities, and Live Web Cam content pages. We also created custom templates on Strapi, so the internal team can quickly and easily deploy new pages and content moving forward.
Adding a guest checkout option
Customers no longer need to create an account to purchase tickets or rental equipment. All they need to do is sign a liability agreement, and provide their basic contact details and payment information.
The Result
A mobile-friendly website that drives ticket sales and reduces customer service tasks
Codal launched a highly customized, mobile-friendly eCommerce website for Mt. Hood Meadows that truly transforms the rider experience. The process of purchasing lift tickets and rental equipment is faster and easier than ever before, taking significant pressure off of the customer service team. This has resulted in higher online sales, lower operational costs, and greater flexibility for the business.
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