Laura Pizzera, CheckYeti’s Head of Operations, is a talented skier and an advocate for bringing the great outdoors online and to as many people as possible. For her, CheckYeti is currently experiencing success and rapid growth rightly because of the mission to get people outside. She joined the company in 2017 as an intern, and within two years had taken on a leadership role. Part of what made her a perfect match for CheckYeti was her intense interest in skiing – she started when she was four and has since taught countless people how to expertly conquer the slopes – and her passion for working into projects with dynamic and curious people.

Laura is an enthusiastic speaker, and offers substantial narratives to illustrate how CheckYeti got its start, how she came to be a leader within the company, and how their unique team culture has survived and thrived through swift growth.

Founded on the slopes

According to Laura, the original founding team of Stefan and Georg received the initial inspiration for CheckYeti while attempting to book ski lessons. The pair had friends in town and as a group, they all wanted to head to the slopes for a lesson. What they found was that it was tricky to find the right ski school for them. There was no way for them to really vet the ski schools thoroughly, and the main source of information were the schools and resorts themselves. To get the right information, they would need to go onsite to resorts and schools, which made comparing prices and quality that much more difficult.

Wanting to alleviate this particular pain point for those hoping to book ski vacations and more, the two created the CheckYeti platform. They founded the company in 2015 in the center of Vienna, where the quickly growing firm is still headquartered today. Their space is vibrant, in the same building as travel startup Tourrador – “it’s now almost like a Viennes online travel hub,” says Laura – and located next to the opera house.

Adhering to solving the original problem that inspired them, CheckYeti makes it easy for anyone interested in heading into the weeds to compare sporting schools and resorts, and book pretty seamlessly. CheckYeti even created a plugin for Booking.com that enables people booking their holiday stays to directly add their outdoor activity into the mix.

What makes CheckYeti stand out, apart from their roster of over twelve thousand bookable experiences for all seasons, is a team of 50 (and growing) who are passionate about outdoor sports and partake in them regularly themselves.

The great outdoors

Laura indicates that part of what CheckYeti hopes to achieve is to raise awareness of all the different options there are for holidaymakers and outdoor enthusiasts. “We provide inspiration to people to try new things or help them find the right offer in activity categories they already know,” says Laura.

CheckYeti works to bring outdoor sports and activities, especially those that are in farther-off locations and thus harder to discover, to everyone. The goal is to cover as many activities as possible in thousands of non-urban touristic hotspots. To bolster this vision, the company has a blog overflowing with tips, tricks, ideas and expertise on everything from surfing, rafting and snorkeling to canyoning and skiing. For instance, readers can hop onto the extensive blog and learn how to execute the perfect parallel turn, which may in fact nudge them closer to booking ski lessons.

So not only are Laura and her team getting people outside, they are providing the requisite knowledge for people undertaking their new adventures. “More people want to get this information before they try things themselves,” Laura says. “We want to enable the customer to learn and do it themselves.”

This has become an important part of succeeding in bringing traditional industry online. A huge share of the providers CheckYeti works with are in small towns that aren’t so digitally connected. It’s taken a lot of effort to bring these people and providers into the digital world, and has involved a lot of educational work to show these providers the potential benefits of getting connected via the platform.

“We hear from providers that they love the simplicity of our product and that we save them a lot of time and money in their operations,” says Laura. CheckYeti helps providers convert customers, handle bookings, refunds, and payments, and takes care of a lot of the communication tasks. “For many smaller providers, being visible online is a key benefit,” she continues, alluding as well to the friction CheckYeti removes via offering instant booking.

“We can really see how the market is developing and can help people understand it,” explains Laura, alluding to the EUR 34 billion global outdoor activity market. Skiing, climbing, canyoning, hiking and other activities in that sphere comprise one of the quickest growing segments within tourism. Laura continues, “we put emphasis on helping outdoor providers to better use our platform for their purposes.” The providers are not always as savvy as they could be when it comes to leveraging the platform to grow their own businesses and getting connected to the huge pool of clients CheckYeti has.

“We’ve helped so many of our providers grow, even the ones that aren’t in prime spots,” says Laura. “Now they are on this big platform where they can show off their services to people who wouldn’t normally know about them.” And thus the great outdoors and the world seeking activity-enthusiasts are connected. “We understand their world,” says Laura. “We are part of both worlds.”

An adventurous vibe

Something Laura is quite proud of is that the company still maintains its close-knit environment and friendly structure. Since its founding, CheckYeti has grown from a few people to a bustling team of over fifty outdoor activity enthusiasts. “We put a lot of emphasis on the team culture of working together in one room on one big project,” she says.

Passion brings CheckYeti’s team together. Nearly everyone who works for the company has some form of background in winter or summer sports. In fact, each team has at least one former or current ski instructor. A number of team members even take occasional time off to return to their home towns to teach their outdoor sport. Every year, the entire team goes skiing together, and frequently enjoy white water rafting and canyoning either as a whole team or as sub-groups within the company. The idea is to get closer as a company, and better understand the variety of products they are helping people book.

“What brings us together and what makes this whole culture so good is our love for outdoor sports,” Laura says. Since starting at the company, Laura has gone from a ski aficionado to a fan of many outdoor activities. Through CheckYeti, she’s tried scuba diving, canyoning and more, and has aspirations to go paragliding off Table Mountain in South Africa.

Laura relates that every morning when she comes into work, the office is abuzz with customer happiness representatives excitedly speaking to customers in a variety of different languages. “In high season, it feels like a huge bustling holiday activity catalogue that’s connected to the whole world” says Laura.

Presently, the company has team members from twelve different countries, speaking eleven different languages. “What’s very cool is that many of our colleagues are multilingual, and some even speak five languages fluently, which means that sometimes you hear multiple languages being spoken in a single conversation,” Laura says.

“We’re talking to the whole world,” she continues. One of her favorite examples of how CheckYeti is connecting the world to outdoor activities and sports in recent memory is coming into work one day and speaking with a colleague all the way in New Zealand. The team member in question is currently on the other side of the world traveling to ski and surf schools to bring them onto the platform. It’s nearly this colleague’s bedtime, and Laura and her team are excitedly hearing the news of new schools and resorts joining the platform. Though the CheckYeti team can’t travel every inch of the world, they prefer to have representatives actually make it to the key providers in person for a personal onboarding process.

Personal attention

In general, online platforms bring initial value to their customers by decreasing the friction of booking holidays and activities. As an online booking platform, CheckYeti offers the same ease of choosing and booking activities, though one of their main selling points is their commitment to personal attention. Laura highlights that not only can customers book the best ski or surf school for them, among other experiences, they can easily reach someone in the CheckYeti office if they need further advice, expertise and recommendations.

CheckYeti team members are always ready to get into the nitty-gritty details with curious customers, as any given staff member may have taught the very activity someone is hoping to book – or at least spent a lifetime learning the ropes to then impart on interested parties. “We have a well-trained customer happiness team that can answer all sorts of questions,” says Laura. This attention to the needs of their customers, derived from their understanding of the activities they work with and what people may need to know prior to booking the right activity for them, gives CheckYeti an advantage in the online booking market.

“We bring the online world to the personal contact world,” says Laura. She recalls two stories that specifically showcase how important it is to have this personal attention in the foundation of how CheckYeti operates.

In one such tale, tourists from the UK were looking to book a ski resort in Spain, and chatting with a CheckYeti representative who had local knowledge of the region. Wanting to give the customers the best experience possible, the representative revealed to them that there was actually not enough snow where they wanted to book, and advised them that if they drove only twenty minutes away from that locale, they’d find the ideal amount of snow. As well, the other location had a better school for kids. Trusting the CheckYeti rep, the tourists in question happily booked the other resort.

Laura also recounts how another colleague helped a group book a kite surfing lesson over the phone, and ended up being their instructor for the very same lesson they booked. It was rather unique and special for the clients to have that level of knowledge given to them when booking the experience, and even more special to receive the knowledge firsthand from the CheckYeti representative and kite surf instructor.

“We are in a position where we have so much in-depth knowledge, and this information is highly valuable to customers interested in a new activity or location,” says Laura. “This is information you won’t get anywhere else.”

Laura’s journey with CheckYeti has been an exciting one. “What I’ve liked most has been the challenge of improving my managerial and leadership skills in literally every situation I’ve encountered,” she says. “I’ve enjoyed motivating and preparing the team for every upcoming challenge, and encouraging people to build on what they’ve learned.”