Liftopia Announces Series A Funding with Sand Hill Angels

03/12/2008: Yahoo Biz: Liftopia Announces Series A Funding with Sand Hill Angels

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Liftopia.com(TM) Announces Series A Funding With Sand Hill Angels
Wednesday March 12, 1:29 pm ET

Bay Area Based Company Finds Success in Offering Discounted Ski Lift Tickets Online
SAN FRANCISCO, March 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Liftopia.com(TM), the nation's first online marketplace for discount ski lift tickets and alpine resort activities, announced today that it has successfully completed a Series A round of funding. Sand Hill Angels led the round and was quickly joined by online travel veteran Erik Blachford, former CEO of Expedia, in addition to North Bay Angels and a multitude of individual investors.

Founded in 2005, Liftopia.com was designed to meet a sizeable void within the multi-billion dollar ski resort industry. By offering discounted lift tickets to customers online, Liftopia helps ski resorts to generate incremental demand through airline and hotel-style yield management practices.

"We were impressed with the accomplishments made by the Liftopia founders in creating an innovative platform focusing on revenue management for the alpine resort industry," said Jim Connor of Sand Hill Angels. "Liftopia enables providers of leisure services to test, measure and manage the demand and revenue for their products. We see Liftopia's platform becoming a 'must have' for any serious manager of resort-related activities."

Liftopia resort partners are given the unique ability to adjust prices up and down based on day of week, weather conditions, and other components of demand. By allowing for a more efficient management of resort resources, Liftopia is able to pass the savings on to its customers.

This trade-off between flexibility and savings allows patrons to get out and enjoy the sports they love, more often and for less money. Liftopia will use the funds to add more resort partners, aid in site development, and boost marketing and hiring efforts. With the latest addition of well-backed investors and experienced advisors, Liftopia is poised to take the ski-industry by storm.

About Liftopia.com: San Francisco-based Liftopia.com launched in October 2006 as an online resource for skiers and riders to find and buy lift tickets for less. Liftopia helps alpine resorts utilize yield management and distribution strategies from the online travel industry to generate incremental revenue. Liftopia co-founders Ron Schneidermann and Evan Reece have a background in online travel, where they worked at Hotwire.com to help partners sell excess inventory online. They took those principles and applied them to an area where both are passionate -- skiing.