Gregg Blanchard
Camelback Mountain Resort is one of the most popular corners of Pennsylvania’s beautiful Pocono Mountains. With an award-winning indoor water park, 166 acres of ski trails, a beautiful lodge, and dozens of activities, the resort is loved by locals and destination visitors alike.
But as the impacts of COVID-19 spread, the resort had a challenge: the front desk. As demand rebounded and lodging bookings increased, the number of guests quickly presented a social-distancing hurdle for their team, including AJ Stack, the resort’s Director of Ancillary Revenue.
“There were two challenges. First, our local government has mandated that we limit the number of guests arriving at any time. Second, we also needed to keep closer tabs on guest arrivals in case of contact tracing. Our PMS offered us no way to schedule and track arrivals to ensure we wouldn’t have too many people arriving at the same time.”
We are constantly encouraging our resorts – customers or not – to talk to us if they have these sorts of needs, and that’s exactly what AJ did. He got in touch with Nick Haggerty, one of our Strategic Account Managers, and they started to brainstorm.
Before long, Nick saw a solution.
“There are three important things to remember about Inntopia Commerce. First, products are really flexible. You can create any combination of time or date or quantity limit you can imagine. Second, products don’t have to cost anything. Third, the checkout path is fully customizable. So we created a series of $0, check-in time ‘products’ and then hid the payment form during checkout. Then, all Camelback had to do was give each guest a link to the ecommerce store where these check-in times were available and the guest could reserve an arrival time from whatever device they happened to be on.”
Within a couple days the products were built, the interface customized, and the flow tested. A few days after that, Camelback went live. For AJ and his team, the solution worked great.
“We needed something quickly but we needed something that we could confidently roll out to our guests. The solution we came up with checked all of those boxes. It’s been a simple, effective way to ensure we don’t have too many people arriving at one time and, if needed, a record of who arrived when. It worked so smoothly we ended up using it for water park check-ins as well!
Nick pointed out another benefit of this approach.
“While the use case for these features was new, the features themselves weren’t. Hundreds of resorts have built tens of thousands of products like these over the years. Right now a lot of resorts are trying to solve big problems with brand new, untested features. We’re extremely grateful our platform allows us to help folks solve these challenges without forcing them to be guinea pigs at a time when the consequences could be significant if things don’t work.”
