Volume 26 Two Years On DISCUSS THIS FEATURE HERE 9th September 2005

“No company can any longer afford to ignore the Internet, even if it does not itself sell much or anything at all online. Consumers are behaving as if they see no great distinction between online and offline shopping. They do both. For most consumers, the Internet is just another sales channel, and a convenient tool for browsing and research, and they make their purchase in whatever way happens to suit them best. To reach these customers, companies have had to look at new and different advertising and marketing strategies”

(From May 15-21 issue, The Economist Newspaper Limited, London, 2004)

Read on for the next installment of the setting journals - which marks the second anniversary of the Arai English website going online. Summer operations at the resort are also summed up…

Towards the end of June this year the annual rainy season finally came on, and the impact that a sudden downpour has on a parched mountain is quite dramatic. As the water moves downhill, it both gathers momentum and volume, creating streams that erode earth traveled over while picking up sand, rocks etc. in the process. All of this eventually comes crashing down on the asphalt of the fire road leading up the mountain, and the result can be seen in the images immediately below.

The resort actually shares the land with the municipal office agriculture and forestry section, so they carried out repairs on the above around the middle of July.

Such annual rains are one of the reasons why the resort stopped pursuing the Asian Leg of the UCI Downhill World Cup MTB Event, despite having hosted this event for several years in a row. At that time, considerable expense would be put into preparing downhill courses and the like, only to have them all washed away overnight. The process would then have to be repeated once or twice again prior to the event, pushing the viability of hosting future events out of reach.

The Kids Adventure Summer Residential Camps for 2005 have now wound up, and for the first time in the six years that the camps have been held, two international counselors participated. To come clean, both of these counselors came to the resort initially in the winter to work as ski/board guides & then left at the end of the season but remained in Japan. One returned to Tokyo to take up residence in a “Gaijin House” and found work in an Italian Restaurant as a waiter/prep cook. His line is that in Japan, for foreigners to find work the most important thing to have is motivation. You can view photos & text in Japanese from the Kids Adventure Summer Camps here.

In the last volume of the setting journals, I mentioned that the resort often lends out its vast parking lots each green season for events. On Sunday, 24th of July 1,600 Kawasaki Motor Bikes descended on the resort from all over Japan to participate in a Kawasaki Bike Magazine event. Several of my co-workers and I were drafted to help out with traffic control and the like, and together with the two international counselors above I found myself directing massive numbers of Kawasaki Bikes into and out of the resort. Although I had actually done traffic control work at the Butchart Gardens back in Canada, convoys of speeding bikes proved more of a challenge than my days guiding buses full of tourists. It was neat to see all the different bikes, and the motivation guy I mentioned above also enjoyed himself. He found enough of it at the end of the event to ask to pose with two of the scantily clad Kawasaki Bike Women working the resort exit!

One of the things I enjoy about my job here is that no two days are the same. Just the other day, one of the lift guys came through the main office looking for Gondola help. Specifically, he needed volunteers to take a walkie-talkie, and man the lower base so that when the order came through to start the Gondola, the volunteer with the walkie-talkie would do so. Although the resort does not offer Gondola service during the green season, maintenance and the like needs to be carried out on each of the 37 towers. On this particular day, a special maintenance Gondola with technical crew was on the Gondola line, and every time they needed to move to the next tower the volunteers were called into action via the radio.

A few volumes back I reported on the sudden passing of one of the original members of the house band for the resort, Trio Latino. While such a tragic occurrence would mean the end of the road for some, the two remaining members returned to the Philippines in May and together with their production company immediately began auditioning for a new member. Bringing further meaning to the expression, “The Show Must Go On”, Ray and Eddy have now welcomed to Trio a new singer, Edmond. Although everyone still misses the late Mr. Onesimus S. Diasanta, “Nays” (as he was known here at the resort) I believe would be pleased to know that the music of his group continues into the future. “Trio” (as they are fondly called at the resort) triumphantly returned to the resort this summer, and I’m hoping to catch their act again this coming white season…

For regular readership of this column, you may recall that I wrote about the new English Web for the resort in Volume 10 of The Setting Journals, “A New Beginning” during the summer of 2003.

I have now gone back and read it, and memories of that year came flooding back. To start with, that season finished early due to a lack of snow as opposed to the most recent one that went into the third week of May! The early finish to that season was coupled with the “Sony Shock” of 2003, a double whammy in that both the anticipated revenue from a full season did not materialize and the value of Sony Stock backing the resort halved!

Although such conditions were not ideal for constructing and launching a new site, it was something that I had been pushing towards for a long time. Although Iponics Japan (who of course are also the people who made and run a website you may have heard about called Snow Japan) made the site & advised wherever possible, the content and final decisions on what to do were all mine, thanks to complete delegation of the task to me by my boss at the time - Mr. Tsukada. So, with such a mandate in hand, I just made the most of it and hoped for the best; In other words, “An Anderson Job”!

The remainder of this volume will now explore the following aspects of the site - construction, the first two years online and a forecast for the next two years.

Construction

I found this to be quite a stressful time, but now clearly understand why most people do not find construction of a website easy!

Fortunately, the Iponics team broke everything down into the following nine successive steps (completed over a four-month period, not necessarily in this order!)

For Design, I visited various sites on the web, listened to advice, and then used the backs of old wall calendar pages to draw up a tentative site map/Index. Eventually, I had half a wall covered with a working mural in a room I was using at the time. I was soon to find however that while helpful, covering a wall with a working mural is a far cry from going public with a web site!

Iponics took care of Making the template page, once it was agreed such a page should reflect both the four seasons of the resort as well as acting as a frame for the mountain itself. Eventually, four template pages representing the respective seasons were made, and for the past two years these templates have rotated with the seasons.

So far so good, but everything broke down on my end when it came to Submission of content. Although my background as a language teacher had prepared me for the notion that understanding something is not necessarily enough for explaining it to others, the reality in 2003 was that the resort did not have an integrated Japanese web site for all of it’s services.  So, before I could implement the working mural mentioned above into a communicable form for others, first I would have to bring everything together internally, translate it from Japanese into English, and then organize it into an unformatted style that could be sent via e-mail along with images and the like for construction. Quite the job when you consider that the process had to be repeated for each page of the site!

Although the above did cause loss of hair, every time that the Iponics team came back for final approval with a test page in the Creation of pages stage, it provided motivation to continue. Life is like that in my mind, you don’t realize that you have something in you until there is no choice but to create/do something. Although I am the first to admit that I still have many things to learn in the creation of web pages, the process now has become much more enjoyable and quicker compared to two years ago.

There was a point during construction where I realized that in Finalizing structure of the site, it was not going to be possible to get everything that I wanted done on the site at that time. Most of this had to do with a lack of content available during the project frame, so I rationalized and decided to get the basics down and come back at a later date to finish off certain parts. Two years on I’m still fiddling with the structure as needs arise, but the difference now is that I have both a decent site map and a fundamentally solid site with which to work.

One of the best lessons I learned during the entire construction process was that, while what the user sees on the front end is important, on the back end Finalizing database structure for the site is equally crucial for long term management. While my experience at the resort to that date along with my MBA facilitated deciding which fields to include within the database, it was emphasized that the fields cannot be changed easily once in place. Along with technical reasons for this, consistency of the type of data collected also factors into the equation.

I’ve heard about people making their own websites, and although for some this is the way to go, not everyone can Develop functionality. By such, I mean that instead of a site just being an information sheet, a professional can develop functionality into the design of the site to give the user an “interactive” and fun experience. Some of the functionality incorporated into the site includes online update capability, coupons and the weather - managed via an online administration center. Having such functionality in place has enabled me to post an English weather report complete with images (from the Japanese site) for the mountain on the site from an Internet connection in Canada.

Testing of all of the above went relatively smoothly over a period of almost three months (until the site went Online). I must admit that at times my lack of technical knowledge must have tested the patience of the Iponics team, but somehow and thankfully that has now all been put behind us.

I was physically tired and stressed at the end of the above process, but to be honest the trip has only just begun. Going public with something like a web site means scrutiny from friend and foe alike, so I was pleased that it came online during a quieter time of the year.

What I was not ready for was the amount of support required to keep the site up to date. Quite a bit of this had to do with the resort itself, as the seasonal operations require related changes in operating hours, pricing, services available and the like. Through my own mistakes, I learned to try to use “timeless language” wherever possible within the site, and also quickly realized that it is not a good idea to list a specific person & his/her e-mail address on the site due to staff turnover.

External factors beyond my control however also contributed to an increased workload concerning the site, including:

The above was all taken in stride however as the resort became stronger in my mind as a result of having two sites with independent URLs (one for the Japanese & another for the English). As each site provides a different perspective on the same product, web-savvy users visit both to look for the best value etc. The sites have also fed off each other as well, with the English site adopting images from the Japanese site and the Japanese site utilizing for itself similar functionality initially developed on the English Web.

The first winter with the new independent site (White Season 2003-’04), found repeater guests pleased that the resort FINALLY invested time and resources on the English site, and responded favorably by reserving online via the booking forms & introducing friends to the process as well. Despite the increase in such visitors to the resort, my phone actually rang less compared with previous seasons, as guests could find timely information online for themselves. The integrated database for the site also proved its worth, as for the first time I could bring up required data for a guest within a few seconds when needed, instead of either scrolling through a bunch of e-mail or paper archives of previous visits. Finally, when talking with guests over the phone while they were online, I could advise them in real time which part of the site to visit even though at times I was not online myself.

For the successive winter (White Season 2004-’05), data gathered concerning usage of the site from the previous season was briefly analyzed. One of the results was that users wanted to be able to reserve equipment online. A related online booking form was then made and the link was provided to guests throughout the season via e-mail along with other links to online booking forms as individually required. While such an online concierge process was time consuming from an operations point of view, it contributed to both a significant increase in sales and customer satisfaction. That said, given the popularity of call centers and the like, some customers expressed surprise that I was in fact based at the resort, instead expecting Blair Anderson to be either a name that the resort made up and/or a cover used by a call center in India.

All of this made the web site a busy place, to the point that although some support was required on the site, no related requests were made for the first three months of the year. Since that time however, a great deal of work has been carried out on the site leading up to the summer, with more work planned for the fall.

I have never made such a forecast on a public venue before, but as the duration between the white seasons FEELS shorter with each successive year - like everything else time related - it is necessary presently.

In 2005 Japan, I feel that the snow industry has finally woken up to the Internet age. Instead of viewing this medium with suspicion, it is now FINALLY being embraced for what it is - “just another sales channel, and a convenient tool for browsing and research”.

Given such, the days when a snow resort could get by without a web site in this country are finished. Moreover, snow resorts that have either just strictly Japanese sites, or perhaps a token static skeleton copy in English of their main site, will fail to stand up to the discerning international powder hound.

While I cannot speak for Europe, one only has to look to North America to see how far the snow industry there has embraced the Internet. Such a perspective also shows how far Japan has to/can go to reach a similar technological standard in the industry.

Speaking of North America, I heard that their 2004-’05 White Season was a stinker in terms of snow. Future powder hounds will travel overseas in greater numbers in my mind to get their fix - especially when they cannot get it locally. Relatively steady snowfall in Japan of recent years can only see the archipelago benefiting further from such a trend.

Going forward therefore, I think that the English Web for the resort will see a further increase in traffic for White Season 2005-’06, as both repeat users return and new users discover it. Hopefully, all of the intended improved functionality etc. of the site will be in place and working prior to the peak of the season. It has come to the point where each green season, I try to implement further improvements in the functionality of the site in order to make my job for the coming white season more manageable.

For the Green Season of 2006, the English Web will play a larger role relative to the present/past given that the resorts Japanese Web will by then be used more as a Marketing Tool instead of the traditional information board of past. Although the Japanese Web for the resort FINALLY got around to actively Marketing online this summer, packages and the like became available too late. Now that the materials are online however, users can browse them over the coming winter, leading to a more favorable response come next summer.

White Season of 2006-’07 is when the resort could finally have a decent & integrated Web Marketing program up and running for both the Japanese and English sites.

What I can’t forecast at this time are the external factors (both within the company and outside of it) that will affect operations of the site over the next two years.

Come with me next time in the setting journals as I introduce a new mini-series intended to take us through the white season of 2005-’06. Hopefully by that time the cooler weather will have arrived, & with it further indication of when the first snows are going to fall.

In the meantime, I understand that many of you will now be back/have arrived in Japan following a summer overseas. Welcome back/Welcome - please do visit the thread linked to this article to say hello.