Congratulations goes out to Northstar-at-Tahoe for taking first place for “Best E-commerce” website at the California Travel & Tourism Commission’s (CTTC) annual California Tourism Marketing Excellence Awards. In the final hour, it came down to the top two finalists: Northstar and one of our client’s, Heavenly Mountain Resort. The winner was selected by conference attendees via a live hand-held remote voting system.

While it is hard to beat the 2nd place drum, we were pleased to see Heavenly perform as well as they did.  Competition consisted of organizations throughout the state of California, and it is especially interesting to see the top two finalists coming out of the Lake Tahoe area. Must be something in the water.

From a purely educational perspective, I would like to take a few moments to look at some of the strengths and weaknesses of the two sites to get a sense of what the judges might have been thinking.

Both Northstar and Heavenly have many similar features. Here are the primary components:

• A Flash driven promotional area that displays rich images of the mountain and the resort, combined with XHTML and CSS for faster download time and accessibility for search engines and mobile devices.
• Primary Horizontal Top Navigation
• Current Conditions
• Video Snow Report
• WebCams
• Blog
• Podcast
• MySpace Page
• RSS Feeds
• Online Booking
• Interactive Maps
• Email Signup

However, there are some features on Northstar’s website that are missing on Heavenly’s. The most notable ones are:

• Video Share
• This application allows users to submit their own videos to Northstar’s website.
• Desktop Tahoe Alert
• A downloadable weather application that allows the user to access conditions by clicking on a desktop icon.
• Mobile Alerts
• Users can receive both mobile video and snow alerts directly to their mobile devices.
• Web Poll
• The web poll is a great way to interact with visitors and offers a useful means of compiling data on customer preferences.

Additionally, because this is an E-commerce competition, you could argue that Northstar is more aggressive in marketing their room and ticket sales simply by the amount of real estate it commands on the homepage.

There are a few areas where I think Heavenly does a better job than Northstar:

First, in my opinion, Heavenly’s design is a lot cleaner than Northstar’s and therefore much easier to navigate. Northstar has a lot going on with their homepage. As you scroll down it is hard to know where to look.

Second, Heavenly has placed a greater emphasis on rich photography, which I think really sells the beauty and excitement of the mountain experience. Of course, Northstar really targets families first, and you will see that carried through with their imagery.

Third, Heavenly TV takes the photography to another level by using high quality production streaming video to portray the exceptional skiing and snowboarding, extensive nightlife, and beauty of Lake Tahoe. The web visitor really gets a sense of what it is like to be there.

Fourth, Heavenly generally performs better than Northstar in organic search results. Just Google “Lake Tahoe Skiing,” for instance, and you will see what I mean. This is obviously important when it comes to reaching new customers.

Finally, I really like the fact that Heavenly pulls their blog feed directly to their homepage.

With all that being said, this was an E-commerce competition that Northstar won. We can take heed of why and work towards winning the next one. Again, a huge congratulations to Northstar and their marketing department. Nice work!

tags: Heavenly Mountain Resort, Northstar-at-Tahoe, California, Travel, Tourism, Conference, CTTC, Awards

This entry was posted by Robert Payne on Wednesday, March 21st, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Company News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.