Active Network Opens Trail to Online Ski Reservations with Colorado Deal

In financial results for the quarter ending Sept. 30, San Diego’s Active Network (NYSE: [[ticker:ACTV]]) said it paid $21.5 million in cash to acquire RTP, an Avon, CO-based IT company that provides online registration services for Vail and other ski resorts.

While the deal is consistent with the Active Network’s basic strategy, it is the first acquisition the company has made in winter sports as well as the destination resorts market, according to Alan Cole, a senior general manager at the Active Network. The San Diego company provides online registration services for a variety of sports leagues, marathons, and other recreational sports, as well as reservation services for campsites, community activities, business conferences, and other events.

The Active Network has more than 2,600 employees, and processed more than 70 million online transactions last year for 47,000 customers around the world, including Ironman, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and the US Tennis Association.

RTP began in 1998 as part of Vail Resorts, providing IT services as well as a point-of-sale commerce engine for Vail and several other Rocky Mountain ski areas. The business was later spun out of Vail Resorts, and now provides software as a service that enables skiers to book resort accommodations, buy lift tickets, ski school classes, and register for other activities. RTP says it also has integrated a host of other services for its customers, including back-office administration and reporting; customer relationship management; RFID access control; interactive marketing; website development; mobile apps and promotions; and augmented reality mobile application development. The integrated set of technologies captures customer transactional data for analysis and marketing.

RTP currently serves 20 of the top 30 ski resorts in North America, including the Aspen Skiing Company, Intrawest, and Powdr Corp., as well as Europe’s SkiStar, and VERBIER-St-Bernard.

Cole says RTP also has begun to develop other interesting opportunities in unrelated markets, including online registration services for Colonial Williamsburg, the destination resort in Williamsburg, VA, and for several water-parks, which he did not identify.

It was the Active Network’s second quarter as a public company. The company narrowed its third-quarter loss to $1.4 million (from a loss of $10.9 million during the same quarter last year) loss on total revenue of $89.6 million, (a 23 percent increase over the $73.1 million generated during the same quarter last year.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.