Liftopia
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Liftopia was an online marketplace for ski lift tickets founded in 2005 in the San Francisco Bay Area. For 15 years it aggregated discounted lift tickets from hundreds of ski resorts, letting skiers buy in advance online and giving resorts a yield-management channel for unsold inventory. It also built ticketing and resort-management software that the ski industry regarded as highly innovative.
02 / Liftopia FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors
after COVID-19 forced mid-March 2020 ski-area shutdowns, Liftopia delayed remitting lift-ticket proceeds to resort partners; Aspen Skiing Co. CFO emails cited in the article show CEO Evan Reece estimating about $2 million owed, saying repayment depended on securing capital, while resorts argued ticket revenues that were never Liftopia’s had been spent on items such as rent and payroll.
Colorado Sun tied Liftopia’s payment crisis to the sudden COVID-driven shuttering of ski areas in mid-March 2020.
CEO warned partners of delayed remittances and said he needed to secure capital; resort emails alleged ticket proceeds had been spent on operating costs.
Aspen, Alterra, Arapahoe Basin and Cypress Bowl pursued an involuntary bankruptcy petition claiming more than $2 million in unpaid remittances.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Liquidation
Aspen Times reported Liftopia Inc. transferred assets on 29 Oct 2020 via assignment for the benefit of creditors (ABC) to a liquidator LLC so an out-of-court liquidation sale could pay Aspen Skiing Co. and other resort creditors after an earlier involuntary bankruptcy petition was dismissed.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Liftopia's assets were acquired by Skitude, a Norwegian-Spanish holding company.
- 02
The acquisition price was not disclosed.
- 03
The Liftopia team went on to found Catalate, a resort ticketing-infrastructure company.