News Alternative Approaches to Season Pass Sales

Are you considering a different approach this year for next year’s season pass sales? Given the abrupt ending to the 2019/20 season and the economic uncertainty for many, it may be worth offering alternative or even multiple payment options for your passholders. If you do, contact Inntopia Partner Services to determine whether you need to use multiple sales channels for your offerings. These options work best with a one-way, reservation-delivery-only, integrated Inntopia supplier account but can also work without an integration.

Pay-In-Full

If your approach to season pass sales in the past has been to require 100% due at the time of purchase, we still recommend creating the same season pass products you normally would. These products would be available until your season pass purchase deadline is reached.

For the deposit schedule, you would require 100% due at the time of booking.

Deposit Down, Balance Due on a Future Date

Many resorts already offer their guests the ability to pay a deposit on their pass products and then pay the remainder on a future date. This option is easy to set up by creating separate pass products from your pay-in-full options. When you create this product, within the Restrictions menu, set the Status setting to Active Only During Specific Times and populate both the Begin Date and Expire Date. This will automatically set an arrival date for all products sold.

In the following example, the dates are set to November 1, 2020 and April 30, 2021, dates that represent the upcoming North American winter season.

For the deposit schedule, set the down payment to be due at the time of booking. The remainder would be due XX number of days prior to arrival. In the case of our example, if we want the balance to be paid by September 15, we would set the remainder to be due 47 days prior to arrival on November 1.

The payments can be processed using the Guest Payment Queue within Inntopia CRS.

Pass Renewal Promotions

You may have decided to offer existing passholders a discounted pass price to renew. Since these offers would only be available to those renewing a pass, you could use a promotion to make these offers available to previous passholders via email. The promotion could also include the pay-over-time option with a promotion-specific deposit schedule. For assistance with creating these types of promotions or building the correct links to add to emails, please contact us.

We understand that this is a difficult time for your resort and that you may be facing a lot of unknowns. Please do not hesitate to contact Partner Services with questions or requests for assistance. We are here and ready to help.