Vail Ski Resorts seems to be way ahead of the curve when it comes to owning great domain names that are important to their businesses. I was doing a bit of research, and I noticed that Vail owns 3 of the 5 .com names for their resorts, which are also syonymous with the names of the towns in which they are located.
Vail Resorts owns Breckenridge.com, Vail.com, and BeaverCreek.com. They do not own Heavenly.com (owned by Scott Day) or Keystone.com (owned by Keystone Software). In addition, they also own another great generic domain name – Snow.com, which is used by the company as a vacation and travel planning website.
Vail Resorts also owns quite a few longer tail keyword domain names such as ColoradoSummer.com, KeystoneDining.com, and ColoradoPass.com. They aren’t using the long tail keyword names for SEO though – all of them seem to redirect to the Snow.com website.
Vail Resorts has also been a bit aggressive in attempting to defend their virtual turf, filing a UDRP for BeaverCreekReservations.com and VailResortVacations.com. The UDRP was successfully defended by domain attorney John Berryhill. Vail also filed an unsuccessful UDRP for VailOnSale.com, while they were successful in winning the UDRP for RockResorts.com.
Hi Elliot
4 years ago I had the pleasure of meeting the marketing director of the Vail Ski Resorts and he became a good friend.
I was at one of the travel shows and when he told me they had snow.com and was ski resort it was wow somone knows what they are doing.
So onthe ball with domains and marketing we spend the whole night along with one other guys from show discussing domains and how important they where to any business,
be intresting to see when they registered the geo names.
I was impressed what a fantastic name snow.com
Snow.com is an AMAZING Bonus
for a Ski Related Business…
Such a simple… pure name…
Makes me want some hot chocolate
just thinking about it…
~Patricia – DomainBELL
@ Patricia
I agree.. but I am going to settle with some coffee.
I know my friend Lonnie would LOVE to sell them Winter.com 🙂
some excellent investment grade domain names can be found at ————
@ bd
Please don’t spam my blog.
I remember when Vail Resorts had all is sister companies on the sub-domain of vail.com. I think is was iCrossing who got them on or off that strategy.
Either way, they have a ton of domain authority to throw around with the Rock Resorts sites & Vail Development.
You can add http://www.northstarattahoe.com/ to your list now. Not sure how owns the shortened version … but Vail is growing.
Also, John Berryhill is a really nice guy. Helped me out once, fan of the Dead, too!