Posts tagged park city
Life in a Resort Town
02 months ago
As it’s the week before the Resort is scheduled to open, things are ramping up. Just in case it weren’t busy enough, our household had a rather unusual activity happen over the last week. We had a national tv commercial filmed in our backyard!
To my understanding, the location people were looking for a nice backyard with a fence around it, and strange as it seems, our backyard fit the bill. The process was remarkably smooth, but also remarkably fast in that our door was knocked upon during lunch on Friday, the location people spent perhaps 10 or 15 minutes in our yard, came back the next morning for about an hour, after which we chatted that evening about details and signed paperwork on the Monday which lead to set up on Wednesday and filming on Thursday and Friday, whew! We certainly don’t expect this sort of thing ever happening again in our yard, so we took a ton of photos and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of having our backyard transformed into a Hollywood set.
The interesting part is that I’m sure that this would never have happened if we didn’t live in a resort town as I know the commercial filmed each day on Main Street here in Park City and I’m guessing that they just needed to figure out a place to shoot the rest of their scenes – which became our yard. In any case, here are some photos documenting one of the more unique few days that we’ve had at our house!
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Get out of the Office
21 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I don’t mean get out and go ski or ride, although that’s always a good idea. I mean get out from behind your computer screen and talk to your customers face to face somewhere outside of .
I spent a few hours this past Sunday at the Park Silly Sunday Market helping to staff our booth at which we were providing information on our season pass and other local programs. The Silly Market is a great weekly festival held on various parts of the historic Park City Main Street area as is a fantastic way to get out and meet customers that I would never otherwise get to chat with. It’s such a different experience to talk to someone face to face as opposed to over the phone or via email or social networks and it can be eye opening to hear what people have to say, across all sorts of topics. Another interesting aspect is that by talking to people in situations like this, it’s easy to learn about what topics you might need to educate yourself more on, like mountain improvements or ski school options.
So, the next time your sales department asks for a hand at a ski show or selling passes at the local swap, take a few hours and help them out because you never know what you’ll learn. Stay tuned for: “Get out of the Office Take 2″.
Mobile Apps, How Accurate do They Need to Be? Ask Google Maps
51 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
A lawsuit has been recently filed against Google Maps for allegedly providing “unsafe directions” for a pedestrian here in Park City, Utah back in January of 2009. There are a lot of people labeling this a frivolous lawsuit, see the comments on a Mashable post about the suit, but it makes me wonder if this case demonstrates potential issues in posting real-time information online, in particular via a mobile app, perhaps even using an augmented reality, style map.
There is some history to this kind of issue…I found this CNET article from over two years ago describing a case in which a driver was in a rental car, followed the GPS direction from that car too closely and managed to get the vehicle stuck on some train tracks which was then hit by a train – thankfully the driver was smart enough to have gotten out of the vehicle! This isn’t a US issue either as this Computer World article from a few years ago demonstrates (I love the part about signs being posted that say ‘Ignore your SatNav’).
As mobile and geolocation services become more and more prevalent, are there lessons that businesses need to take from this as they design apps and tools for their customers? I hope it’s just that we need to design for the end user, to build apps that add value and are useful, but do we need to keep other things at the forefront as well?
Photo credit: Flickr user arrayexception per CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic
Ski season has arrived in Park City
02 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
I woke up at 6am yesterday (Saturday) morning without needing an alarm. My head was filled with all of the different things that I wanted to check on to ensure a smooth start to the 09-10 winter season at PCMR. I quickly checked a few items on my laptop, while I started on my first up of coffee and was off to the resort at around 7. With two hours until “First Chair”, I had plenty of time to loop in with a number of people who were doing various tasks involved with our Daily Operations Reporting (our DOR). I then wandered over to the ticket office to help stock trail maps, move signs around and start documenting the folks camped out waiting for first chair.
With just two lifts and as many runs to open, our mountain ops staff was ready to go with time to spare, so the first chair actually was loaded at about 8:50am and the season was off and running. I took a few more photos, waited for the lift line to clear and headed up for my one and only run of the day at around 9. I took a few pix as I headed down Homerun and was in the office putting up photos and helping with a few Flip shot videos until about 11.
So to wrap it up, I got my cruising run in on opening day and now I’m ready and waiting for some powder days now – let it snow!
Photo credit: Me for PCMR
My Head is Spinning for a Number of Reasons
02 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
After two incredibly full days at the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco, I’m back in Park City relaxing on my couch and trying to digest the great information and ideas that were put forward during the conference. Two main points that are currently resonating for me are:
- Decide first and foremost what it is that you want to accomplish online.
- Create, and continue to create lots and lots of quality content that relates to what it is that you are trying to accomplish.
I promise to post more about IMS 09 in SF, but I’m pretty wiped out from a very early morning and the need to fully download on everything from the Summit.
It’s been quite interesting getting back to Park City and finding out that our School District officials have canceled school for the next couple of days due to the fact that they think that some kids may have the “Swine Flu.” I looked in a local paper and saw that a Utah state health official said that our local officials “erred on the side of being cautious, but I don’t fault them for that decision.”This is due to the fact that the three cases here in the Park City area are still listed just as “probable” so until they’re confirmed or not I am planning to keep washing my hands every chance that I get, and keep on doing what i always do otherwise.
And then there’s the news that the largest of the local Park City area property management companies, Deer Valley Lodging, is being forced into chapter 7 bankruptcy. This coincides with a separate announcement that Deer Valley Resort will officially announce that are putting together their own property management division. Interesting news, and in my book good news, because many great people should be able to (hopefully) transition from DVL to DVR without the uncertainty that has been hanging over their heads as Deer Valley Lodging has stumbled deeper and deeper into the mire over the past several weeks.
Just a few exciting things around here then, anything interesting going on in your neck of the woods?!
Photo credit: littledan77
A Different View of the Mountain
03 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
It was an early morning for me today, 5:30am to be exact. I was up and out the door so early because I was heading down the Salt Lake City Airport to meet Steve, our Mountain Host Manager, and fly back up to Park City to take some photos and video of the mountain from up above. I’ve been involved with aerial photography at the resort before, but I’ve never been the primary photographer. Thankfully I only wanted to capture a few particular images and I also had our videographer (another Eric) on-board to ensure that even if I completely flailed that we would get something of value out of this endeavor.
In the end, the weather was pristine, the flight flawless and here’s a sample of what I was able to capture:
Thanks again for flying Steve!
Halloween in Park City
03 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in family
Here’s a video from Halloween with the three cutest trick or treaters ever:
A Tale of Two Lunches
03 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in article
Today I attended the Park City Chamber’s 2008 Tourism Industry Fall Forum and as I sat in the audience it struck me how markedly different the dynamic was in this group as opposed to the lunches I had during the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer last week in Scottsdale. Some of contrasts I noted:
- I was the only person twittering during the talks today, a big difference from last week where it seemed like there were more people twittering than not.
- Today it felt like the room was holding it’s collective breath in that a lot of people seemed very nervous about the coming months ahead; whereas, at MPDM, everyone was enthused about the opportunities that they saw coming, whether or not the economy took some lumps or not.
- The best quote from today was that, “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but we’re still in that tunnel.” A good, hopefully true but kinda scary thing to hear. On the other had, I remember hearing “If content is King, marketing is Queen and she runs the house,” from Gary V last week, dunno how that compares but it was just one of many kick ass quotes to come out of that preso.
One last item from today was the fact that several (admittedly engaging and entertaining) TV ads were introduced as being something that had a great chance of “going viral.” Hmm, first off, at MPDM I heard many times that spending big money on traditional media was essentially throwing good money after bad as it just isn’t were the eyeballs are anymore. And secondly, guess it’s me, but I’ve come to hate the word “viral”, actually I’m not the only one, and I’d love to see an ambitious online effort made to try to connect with potential visitors to Park City and Utah. Something different for different times, would that make sense?!
Oh, and I’d have to give the best tasting lunch to MPDM, the taco shell salads just didn’t compare to the tortilla soup.
