Redefining Fun: How Innovation Boosts Profits in the Mountain Recreational Equipment Rental Business

Winter snow or summer sun, the recreational equipment rental business is vital to the economy of mountain resort towns. Recreational rental fleets improve the quality of the resort experience by providing exciting ways for tourists to interact with each other and the environment. In a world where everything has an online review, and visitors plan their trips based on the opinions of others, higher-quality experiences can equate to more visitors and more business.

So, how do you maximize interest in your mountain resort rental fleets? How do you ensure that your visitors are sharing their positive experiences in a way that reaches new potential customers? Our answer: invest in innovation.

Here are three ways to use innovative products to improve customer experience, maximize interest, extend marketing efforts, and bring in new visitors.

Invest in Products that Tick All the Boxes

Ski and mountain biking equipment are the traditional rental favorites at mountain resorts, but they appeal to specific interests, and visitors now expect more. If your resort has a mountain slide, rope parks or zip lines, you have family-friendly attractions for all ages, but even these attractions are common now. To generate a higher level of interest, you need more interesting products.

Innovative products like Gravity Coaster offer unique, lean-to-turn steering, rock climbing suspension, and a safe and secure seat position. The vehicle’s design attracts interest and the experience is highly engaging and highly sharable—GoPro footage of a lean-to-turn slalom race is exciting in ways that zip lines and rope park activities are not.

The more radical a product looks, the more marketing power it has; unique and engaging products will be shared and discussed, especially among the hard-to-impress Millennial and Generation Z age ranges of 14-35. These are the most difficult customers to reach because they are often the most distracted--90% of them own smartphones and 70% spend more than 90 minutes a day interacting with content on those devices. To reach them, your rental products must offer highly sharable experiences, and you should be promoting those experiences in new ways across your marketing channels.

Design Experiences with Multi-Channel Promotion Opportunities

It’s not uncommon to have live resort webcams showing the conditions of ski slopes to potential visitors in the winter, but what about webcams that offer a glimpse of summer visitors on their favorite trails? Bikes, Coasters, and Rollers are perfect for creating watchable sport experiences. Consider adding a slalom course, or an obstacle course that can be viewed online as part of a marketing event.

Design experiences that are exciting for visitors to participate in and can also be used for everyday content creation online. A snapshot of the day. A rider testimonial. A rider review of a new product, or an evolutionary step forward for a popular older model.

Our Gravity Roller offers riders and business owners the chance to review the performance of a high-quality full suspension fun roller versus the experience of riding one of the classic ‘Monster’ designs. The Gravity Roller features the spring and comfort of a full suspension vehicle while capturing the fun that has added value to mountain resort rental fleets for over ten years.

Create an App

Many ski areas and mountain resorts have created apps to attract skiers in the winter, foster engagement, gamify experiences, and track user metrics. If you haven’t already, consider adding your rental offer to an existing app or create an app of your own to promote your products.

With your own mobile app, you can offer your customers the ability to secure bookings, track slalom or riding times, gamify performance, interact with other users, give reviews, and gather the metrics you need to make informed decisions.

We hope this article has been useful for you, and we invite you to leave us your thoughts in the comments. Would you like to know more about the unique and innovative products we offer? Feel free to contact us with any questions. We would love to hear from you!