Based in Avon, Colorado, Vail Resorts is one of North America's leading resort operators.

Vail's operations are grouped into three segments— mountain, lodging, and real estate—which represent 65 percent, 25 percent, and 10 percent, respectively, of the company's revenues for the 2002 fiscal year. The company owns and operates four ski resorts in Colorado, a ski resort in Lake Tahoe, California, and a summer resort in Grand Teton, Wyoming. Additionally, the company recently acquired a majority interest in Rock Resorts, which manages ten luxury resort hotels across the United States.

Vail's resorts and resort hotels are designed to provide a comprehensive vacation experience throughout the year to a diverse clientele that features a high-end demographic profile. Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, and Keystone, all located within Colorado, are year-round mountain resorts offering a full range of on-snow and off-snow activities. Heavenly, which is located on the south shore of Lake Tahoe, was acquired in May 2002, making it the fifth resort in the company's portfolio of premier U.S. ski resorts. Over the next five years, Vail Resorts plans to invest $40 million at Heavenly in on-mountain resort improvements including upgrading the existing facilities, building new restaurants, and upgrading or replacing lifts and snowmaking systems, as well as enhancing the resort's environmental efforts.

Vail's resorts and resort hotels derive revenue through a comprehensive offering of amenities, including resort accommodations, lift ticket sales, ski and snowboard lesson packages, retail and equipment rental outlets, dining venues, mountain biking, golf, and private club operations. Other recreational activities include tennis, horseback riding, fishing tours, float trips, and on-mountain activities centers. Besides providing extensive guest conveniences, the company also engages in commercial leasing of restaurant, retail, and other commercial space, real estate brokerage services, and extensive licensing and sponsorship activities with brand-name companies. The firm's wholly owned subsidiary, Vail Resorts Development Co., develops, buys, and sells real estate in and around resort communities.

Vail is using Web services technologies to manage travel reservations over the Internet. The company's leisure travel booking system enables its resorts and resort hotels, as well as destination management organizations and travel and transportation suppliers, to assemble a broad range of travel inventories and destination content for Internet distribution. The booking system is also designed to provide dynamic packaging and connectivity to inventory management systems.

Vail, in partnership with software developer Data-lex, created its Web services-driven booking system in order to boost online travel sales and to improve the efficiency of its sales operations. The design objectives aimed to:

• Encompass all travel components available in one system.

• Enable online packages to be created dynamically.

• Implement promotions rapidly through dynamic pricing and rules capabilities.

• Enable a seamless booking transaction process from purchaser through supplier.

• Increase sales productivity, sales retention, and booking efficiency, while lowering operating costs.

The system's initial phase is available on Vail's Web site (www.snow.com). The service offers visitors robust search, selection, and purchasing functionalities across the represented inventories. The technologies allow travel suppliers to aggregate and package multiple product types, including traditional air, car, and hotel products, with leisure activities such as spa visits, golfing, and skiing.

The system uses an extensible Web Services framework that's enriched with XML messaging. The system allows components to be sold from an array of air, lodging, car rental, ground transportation, activities, shows, and attraction suppliers, each in adherence with complex package-selling rules and restrictions. It also provides support for promotional rates and packaging. Product and reservations requests are directed to the appropriate host inventory source, according to rules established in the system's database. This feature permits connectivity to existing central reservations, or property management systems, for real-time lodging rates and inventory information, and to aggregate this information with rich content, managed and served from the system's database. The product supports connectivity, via legacy system adapters, to the major global distribution systems for selling air transportation and car rentals.

The travel distribution system's functional highlights include:

• Content. This includes detail-rich product information, including extended multilanguage descriptions of the product, as well as destination information.

• Searches. This includes regional, price-based, amenity, attribute, and unit type, with ranked results.

• Packaging. This provides dynamic, a ` la carte, and prebuilt components that are available online.

• Dynamic Rules Engine. This allows administrators to create new rules for promotions, pricing, inventory, and packaging and to rapidly implement targeted and seasonal discounts.

• Connectivity. This makes the system capable of making dynamic calls to locally held inventory on suppliers' own PMS/CRS systems and to selected external systems for availability and pricing.

• Air Fares. This provides access to private-fare pricing and availability, using Datalex's BookIt! Fares software.

Martin White is Vail's senior vice president for marketing and sales. White joined the company in October 2000. Previously, beginning in 1998, White served as vice president of consumer marketing for Delta Air Lines at its Atlanta headquarters. From July 1997 to November 1998, White was vice president of marketing programs and services with US Airways. White began his career in 1987 at Continental Airlines, where he held several management positions. In 1991 he joined Brierley & Partners, a Dallas-based marketing firm, where he headed the company's work with United Airlines and was later named senior vice president of the international division, based in Chicago.

White says the Vail's Web services partnership with Datalex draws on each company's strengths.

We built the whole engine in conjunction with Data-lex. We built the front end and the user interface while they provided all the middleware. Some of the system pulls directly from Datalex's other products— they're the back end behind Orbitz, for example.

White notes that the booking system was designed to appeal to the well-heeled and technologically savvy type of person the company typically attracts.

Over 90 percent of our guests have access to the Internet, which isn't surprising, given the fact that we deal with very affluent guests. Of those people with access, we've surveyed that 80 percent were actually doing some form of research on the Internet prior to booking their ski vacation. That's also not surprising, given the complications associated with a ski vacation. It's much harder to plan and book a ski vacation than it would be, for instance, to go and lie on the beach in Florida somewhere. You've got a lot of different package components, you've got to understand proximities to lifts and village layouts, and things like that. It's much different than a lot of beach resorts. Many of the nice beach resorts, which are very simple to book, are in close proximity to a major metro area.

White notes that implementing Snow.com generated an immediate and very positive impact on sales.

Previously, we did about 11 percent or 12 percent of our bookings online. To date this year [Spring 2003], with the advent of the new online booking engine, we've already doubled that number. We've taken 11 percent to 22 percent.

Snow.com is very consumer-oriented, says White.

Although lots of travel agents and various providers around the travel industry use Snow.com, it's primarily focused as a consumer site. If you're booking on Snow.com, we act as a tour wholesaler. We're also a consolidator in that we communicate and sell a lot of third-party products on that site. For example, Vail Cascade, which is a large lodging property in Vail, gives us rooms inventory. We basically have a standard relationship with them where the customer pays us, and we sell Cascade's rooms. The Cascade actually ends up paying us a commission.

Web services allow Vail to automate its various Web site transactions, including room, air, and rental car reservations.

The best example is the Hertz part of the reservation. We would automatically confirm your Hertz reservations for you. We end up booking the car with Hertz. We get a confirmation number, and then that's conveyed through us as part of your overall vacation confirmation.

White says the technology provides benefits to both Vail and its customers.

Primarily, for the consumer, it means more inventory, more choices. For us, inventory management and yield management are the two big gains we've made in launching this product. We can manage down to the last room availability. We can change prices on a daily basis. We're running it so we don't have to work with a third-party provider to provide them access or provide them inventory, and then we have to wait for them to load it. We just do it ourselves—it's all hooked into our back end.

There's also going to be a lot of CRM capabilities on this booking engine, some of which have already been loaded. We've got a database here at Vail Resorts: If you're in that, then it can pull a lot of information straight from the database.

The introduction of Web services was a big change, as well as a major challenge, for Vail.

We've basically taken the biggest initiative in the industry to go off and actually develop this proprietary software. Just four years ago, most people were still booking via the telephone.

Susan Rubin-Stewart, Vail's director of reservations, says a custom-designed front end makes site navigation very easy.

We call it VCUI—the Vail Consumer User Interface. The front end is written in ASP and communicates in XML to the Datalex portion.

We call the entire system RIBE—the Reservation Internet Booking Engine. It's comprised of "servants'' and a database. That's what the Datalex product is. There's the database and then there's the processing part, which is what they call servants. The servants use the database and make the calls, deliver information to the front end, and receive information for the back end.

Today's system is the result of a two-year development process, says Rubin-Stewart.

I'd sayit's two years of my life. A lot of ital so has to do with the functionality and requirements for a full-blown reservations system. So about a year of my time was spent solely on development.

The system, says Rubin-Stewart, began as a consolidation project, and then evolved into something much more sophisticated.

Initially, we were looking to replace a lot of disparate systems. We had more than one reservation system, and we were trying to centralize data entry, distribution, and so forth. So, actually, it was a big project to begin with. It replaced all of our reservation technology and Web-enabled it.

Datalex was brought into the picture after Vail realized it couldn't handle the job on its own, notes Rubin Stewart.

It became a joint venture, because there wasn't any software that supported our vision. We partnered with Datalex and actually created a joint venture to produce and sell the software.

The Internet portion is very complicated. Replacing your entire reservation system adds additional complex programming to support hosted inventory, accounting, etc.

Vail worked closely with Resort Technology Partners (RTP), a joint venture with Vail Resorts. RTP, located in Avon, Colorado, specializes in software and Internet services for the resort industry. Rubin-Stewart says close cooperation was critical to designing an environment that would serve the needs of both Vail and its customers.

We worked with RTP. They had an information architect and usability designer. On the front end, we developed a page schematic, which represented the kind of flow we would like. We had done surveys of customers who had booked online last year through WorldRes (a Web-based hotel reservations system that includes properties operated by Vail and other companies) among people who bailed out and called us on the phone. What we found was that our customers were pretty evenly divided between those who wanted to assemble a packaged vacation by themselves and those who wanted something very simple—just press a button, and we make recommendations for them.

We sat down with the information architect/designer and really talked about the differences and how we could support both flows. It was definitely like a group working together. We worked closely.

System implementation generated few problems, says White.

It was the normal new product integration and rollout type of scenario. There were some bumps and surprises. As the product was developed, we tried to overcome most of the problems as they arose. But you can't catch everything through testing. Some minor launch problems occurred—mostly with functionality on the sites and on the booking engine. They've been very minor to this point.

Rubin-Stewart says the system implementation difficulties were normal and of the type to be expected for any large development and integration project.

Anyone thinking of getting into this type of project should be aware of the complexities of the project, and expect a lot of hard work, coordination, problem solving, and compromises.

Rubin-Stewart compares the project to the task of burrowing a tunnel between Britain and France.

It was kind of like digging the Chunnel. Actually, that was the expression we used—"The Chunnel.'' There were times we missed things by about a foot—just like the Chunnel itself was slightly off on its trajectory. This is pretty minor, however, when you consider the scope of the project—theirs and ours. In any case, whenever a problem arose, the engine or the front end had to be modified to make it work.

One are awe were all pretty new at was determining the likely user volume and architecting the hardware to accommodate the anticipated flow. As you open the internal systems to outside demands, you can't even guess what kind of load will develop.

Even after the system was up and running, changes had to be made on the fly, says Rubin-Stewart.

We would find a bottleneck that was holding up the processing—maybe the engine, or the WebLogic server software itself, couldn't handle the volume. After we solved that problem, we would solve another engine, or database, problem. You might break one bottleneck, and then you didn't know what you would find when you opened the next set of doors. That was a really huge, eye-opening learning process. I guess every company goes through that. It was very exciting.

Fixing all the bottlenecks wasn't easy, and required a lot of work, says Rubin-Stewart.

It was a combination of many things. We worked really closely with Datalex and also RTP, which had a lot of experience with these problems. It was a three-way group trying to do all this troubleshooting, because there were so many different places where things had to be fine-tuned. There were also things within the Datalex application that may not have been designed efficiently.

There were also changes to the front-end application. There was fine-tuning of the hardware it resided on, increase in the size of the hardware, fine-tuning of the engine itself, fine-tuning of the database, and fine-tuning of the servers. We went from one Web-Logic server to five with a load balancer. Then there's the configuration—it changes when you have multiple servers. We had to double the capacity of our AS/ 400 servers. We didn't actually need to double it, we only needed to increase it by about 50 percent, but that's what IBM requires you to do. We also had to increase the size of the box that handled our management system. And then we had to address how all of these things communicated together.

White says being an early Web service adopter wasn't a risk, but a vital step that was required to ensure Vail's long-term success.

The Internet is a very important component of not only booking travel, but travel in general. So it's a necessary part of every business at this point.

Enterprises need to view Web services in terms of bottom-line benefits, says White.

Think about the revenue generation aspects of what you're doing. Try to tie things to an ROI. Change the use of online communications and e-commerce based on good business sense, not just trying to play follow the leader.

Over the last five years, early in the onslaught of the Internet and the World Wide Web, there was a lot of an "everybody else has it, so I must need it, too'' sort of mentality. Companies that are best at using the Internet have figured out specifically how it's going to improve their business online. They're the folks who have done those sorts of things, as opposed to just playing follow the leader.

Rubin-Stewart notes that Web services are becoming more of a mainstream technology, thanks to pioneers such as Vail. As a result of the work done by her company and other early adopters, IT managers have plenty to gain, and little to fear, from Web services.

It's just like any development project. It all depends how cutting-edge you are, too. It will be much easier for someone else to use the Datalex engine, because it will be easier the second time around. I mean, when you look at it running in its end space, you kind of go: "Oh—this is very streamlined; it's very well designed.'' But being in the development portion of this project, and developing a back end to it simultaneously, was very hard and very painful. It was well worth it, but it will be much easier for people the second time around, if they use applications that are already out there.