Reimagining a World-Class Destination Through Digital Experience Strategy
Aspen Snowmass partnered with Verndale to redesign its core digital experience so the site could better express the brand as a luxury, four-mountain destination while making planning, discovery, and conversion more seamless for guests.
This work was not just a visual refresh. It combined UX strategy, information architecture, immersive brand expression, ecommerce thinking, and ongoing optimization work that later expanded into a broader experiences-platform vision for Aspen One.
The Challenge
Aspen Snowmass is one of the most premium mountain destinations in the market, but internal project materials made clear that the old site was not telling that story effectively.
The digital experience also had to do more than inspire. It needed to help users understand Aspen Snowmass as a destination, not a single mountain, while supporting lift tickets, passes, lessons, rentals, activities, stories, and other trip-planning needs inside one experience.
From a UX standpoint, the site had structural friction as well. Session notes called out overly complex navigation, page sprawl, and a need to revisit content hierarchy so users could move through the experience more intuitively.
Our Approach
Reposition the site around Aspen’s real brand story
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Verndale approached the redesign as a brand and product challenge, not just a reskin. The goal was to help the site communicate Aspen Snowmass as an artful, upscale, modern destination and to make that brand expression more visible to high-value travelers while still encouraging conversion.
Make the four-mountain experience easier to understand
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A major part of the work was helping users understand Aspen Snowmass as a connected destination with four mountains and a much broader set of experiences. That led to decisions around immersive navigation, map-based thinking, and clearer pathways for trip planning and exploration.
Bring commerce closer to the main experience
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The team also explored how to reduce the disconnect between branded storytelling and transactional shopping. Discovery work for the headless ecommerce concept focused on what a more seamless guest journey could look like if shopping behaviors were brought closer to the main AspenSnowmass.com experience rather than living in a separate path.
Extend the redesign into a longer-term experience system
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The Aspen Snowmass work became part of a broader strategic arc. After the core redesign, Verndale continued through site audits, IA refinement, experimentation thinking, and the early framework for an Experiences Portal designed to unify discovery across Aspen One’s ecosystem.
Smart Systems. Better Experiences.
Aspen Snowmass is a strong example of the team bringing UX, brand expression, and strategic platform thinking together in a high-expectation destination environment. The work was not just about making the site look better. It was about helping users understand the full Aspen Snowmass story, reducing friction across planning and discovery, and building a more scalable digital foundation for future experiences, commerce, and ecosystem growth.
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The redesign focused on helping guests plan their visit more easily while reinforcing that Aspen Snowmass is a destination with multiple mountains, activities, stories, and experiences.
Immersive navigation and mapping were used to make the four-mountain story feel more tangible and to encourage exploration rather than shallow browsing.
Content around stories, guides, activism, and sustainability was treated as a core part of the brand experience and not something that should be buried behind navigation friction.
Ongoing optimization work continued to refine rentals, activities, experiences, tables, and right-rail or interior-page patterns based on observed friction in the live experience.
The longer-term UX vision expanded from core web pages into a unified Experiences Hub with mobile-first discovery, curated collections, and clear routing to Book or Connect.
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The original redesign was supported by data-backed information-architecture work, grayscale prototyping, and analytics-informed decision-making before visual execution.
Verndale’s ongoing XOps program included continuous UX and component refinements rather than treating launch as the end of the work.
The team explored a headless ecommerce direction using Aspenware APIs so Aspen could keep existing backend functionality while creating a more seamless front-end shopping experience on AspenSnowmass.com.
The Experiences Portal strategy introduced a more scalable framework for content, taxonomy, navigation, discoverability, and governance as Aspen grows across seasons, brands, and destinations.
That future-state platform vision was also designed to be search-ready, AI-aware, and capable of supporting richer planning tools and more tailored entry points over time.
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Aspen Snowmass represents a large, high-visibility destination business with four mountains, more than 5,300 acres, 40 lifts, and 330-plus trails.
The redesign was positioned specifically to align AspenSnowmass.com with Aspen’s luxury brand, create an immersive four-mountain experience, and improve conversions.
Post-redesign, Aspen Snowmass saw a 10% lift in overall traffic.
Information-architecture updates helped drive roughly 20% year-over-year organic search lift while sustaining a critical acquisition channel.
Internal materials also reference a material increase in revenue conversions year over year following the redesign.
The experience roadmap continued beyond the redesign into an Experiences Portal framework intended to unify discovery, improve engagement, increase wallet share, and support long-term ecosystem growth.
