Customer Stories

How Camelback Resort Uses Inntopia Marketing Cloud + Commerce to Generate Loyalty and Revenue

Sixty years ago, Camelback Resort opened for skiing among the slopes of Pennsylvania’s beautiful Pocono Mountains. Twenty-five years later they added Camelbeach waterpark to make the resort a year-round destination. Today, the resort features a beautiful hotel, wedding venues, a new indoor waterpark, and dozens of activities just an hour and a half from New York City.

Camelback’s VP of Marketing, Terri Lutz, spent a career primarily in the casino industry before making her way to the resort in 2022. It didn’t take long for Terri to begin spotting the same opportunities she had been capitalizing on for decades. Just like the casino floor had whales and regular guests, the ski slopes had VIPs getting the best of everything and families with sack lunches. Just like the Tuesday/Wednesday distressed inventory she built campaigns around at Tropicana, she saw unfilled rooms during midweeks and shoulder seasons as opportunities instead of challenges.

The answers, she knew, were in the data. And if there’s one thing Terri loves, it’s data.

“It’s really important for me to understand our customers. And not just the customers who are coming today, the ones we’ve lost or who are simply hidden from our traditional marketing. Luckily, our Inntopia Marketing Cloud database is almost a million strong. I love data and digging into the numbers. One of my most important hires has been a data analyst to help me find these opportunities.”

Together with her Digital Marketing Analyst, Travis Dalton, and her Inntopia account manager, Patrick Sande, she logs in to Inntopia Marketing Cloud daily trying to understand her segments, the next steps that any person or segment could be taking, and designing campaigns to bridge the two.

Loyalty Recognition

For example, Camelback relies on season passholders to generate pre-season revenue and help skiers get on the slopes as much as possible. With help from her account manager, Patrick, Terri saw a layer of loyalty others didn’t and wanted to reward these guests who had so faithfully renewed their passes to the resort. So she had Travis dig into their Inntopia Marketing Cloud database to find everyone who had been a passholder for at least 10 years so they could send them each a gift.

Segmentation by Usage

For skiers who don’t visit the mountain often enough for a full season pass, Camelback also sells The Triple Ticket. Just like it sounds, this three pack of lift tickets fills the gap between day tickets and season passes, but it’s also prone to breakage. So together with Travis and Patrick and help from the Camelback revenue team, Terri used Inntopia Marketing Cloud to segment Triple Ticket customers by usage and create a campaign for each group. For example, those who had used all three tickets got a 20% discount to return and those who still had unused tickets got a campaign designed to get them to use what they’d already paid for.

Ski & Stay

Camelback also recently launched a new ski and stay package. This email marketing campaign uses data to both create the offer and deliver the right message to the right group. As a result, it’s one of their best performing campaigns.

“Our new ski and stay package has already been booked nearly 1,500 times for over $300,000 in revenue. This in part because we’re using the data to target guests across all channels – social, OTT, email, etc. – and increase ROI. With email, for example, because we can segment our guests so well, we’re sending fewer emails but generating more revenue.”

And speaking of revenue, Camelback doesn’t just use Inntopia to generate demand for their products, they also use Inntopia to capture that demand.

screenshot of camelback booking engine

Marketing + Commerce

Terri didn’t just inherit Inntopia Marketing Cloud when she joined the company, she also was given the keys to Inntopia Commerce. And not only that, but a brand new, custom booking engine built on the Commerce API so guests could book everything they need in one cart right from the Camelback website.

“I love that everything is in one booking engine instead of multiple booking engines. The ease of being able to put multiple adventures into your cart means guests can essentially create their own custom vacation. That’s really important as we push people to book direct.”

Just a year in, Terri recognizes there’s still more to learn and more products and packages to build to really maximize what they get out of their systems. But even still, she’s made huge progress for being on the job less than a year at a resort as broad and dynamic as Camelback.

Going Forward

Her secret, again, comes back to understanding the guest and their relationship to the resort.

“Just like I did during other parts of my career, I love to walk the property and learn from our guests. I like to watch how they engage, what they wear, what they bring, what they rent, and understand who they are on a more real level. Paired with the database and survey data we get through Inntopia, it makes a huge difference.“

And that’s not going to change going forward. Her plan is simple; find more people.

Lost customers, abandoned carts, happy customers, customers who could spend more, customers at risk of churning. Once she finds them, she knows she has the tools and team in place to engage each one in a way that gets them to the next step. As Terri told me on the phone;