Mt Buller - rookie error
Mt Buller went into crisis management earlier this week when they updated their Facebook status.
The seemingly innocent status update provided a link to their website providing costs for the 2012 mid week pass.
Within minutes, fans who considered themselves 'loyal' to Mt Buller showed their outrage - 78 comments on this status and growing.
Turns out Mt Buller had increased the price to $1299 when their major competitors, Mt Hotham and Falls Creek had only recently slashed the price of their 2012season passes... $699.
Rather than respond to the comments and/or ignore the profanities, Mt Buller dug themselves a deeper hole by deleting posts and making another status update... Oops, rookie error!
41 comments ensued with 'fans' fuming, eg:
Kathryn Vine So basically if we say something such as rip off, overpriced, or we are going to falls or hotham you guys shall find that offensive and delete our post?
Rob Leen You guys aren't really good at this Facebook thing are you?
Mt Buller finally went into reputation management mode, put forward an official response from their GM, arranged a 2hr Q&A Facebook forum, a Q&A page and discussion section on their facebook page - phew...
But has the damage been done?
Check it out here - https://www.facebook.com/MtBuller?sk=wall
What do you think?? Is it a case of too little, too late?
Oh, another SM disaster! Thanks for the screen-capturing, Sarah. Yes, there are a lot of organisations out there that need to learn the "rules" of SM. It all seems so obvious to us. I expect that there'll be many more of these incidents over the next few weeks and months.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
@Wags: I totally agree with you.
ReplyDeleteThey should have listened to their customers about their greedy price .. btw looking forward to seeing how they can solve the problem
thx for the post :)
This will be an interesting one. In a way I think here we have an opportunity to truly see how SM impacted on market share. After next winter, it will be very interesting to see if their visitors have dropped. Thing is, these ski trips are planned well in advance, and this could be terrible timing for them. So people now noticing something like this may very likely start looking at alternative options. Is they decide on alternatives, this will be a perfect example of how strong SM is and how it really impacted on their business.
ReplyDeleteRoss
It'll be very interesting to see if other mountains take on the opportunity to attract consumers away from Mt Buller. The mountains also have such a limited timeline with the snow season being so short that they couldn't really afford these kind of mistakes...
ReplyDelete@Rossouwe - I agree, my husband said to me last night that he had no intention to revisit Mt Buller - primarily becasue of the crownds but I think the pricing pushed him over the line.
ReplyDelete@RoniJ - I hope they take advantage of it because I'll jump on their bandwagon!
Absolutely amazing!! You would think that after the Gasp case, companies would have learnt.
ReplyDeleteThe difference with this is I dont think this publicity will leave to increased visits to Buller as the price is now ridiculous! So this certainly will have a negative influence on Bullers winter season next year.
With Gasp, it is possible that the extensive publicity will lead to an increase in not only brand awareness, but sales.