Chill Factore, Manchester
What do you do when the domain name you really want is already taken? Well, if you are Boots the Chemist, you choose ‘wellbeing’ instead. Or if you are British Gas, why not settle for house.co.uk? Both of these companies actually thought these were good choices in the early years of the dotcom boom!
They have since seen sense, and have done what it takes to wrest the appropriate domain names from whoever was cheeky enough to register them originally.
But what if you build the UK’s biggest real snow ski slope and call it ‘The Chill Factory’, only to find that someone else has already acquired that domain name? Homer Simpson would say D’oh!, I think. However, these guys were obviously not put off that choice of name. Instead, they changed the spelling ever so slightly. So now we have ‘Chill Factore’ - the stupidest trade name choice since Scottish Telecom decided to call itself ‘thus’. As if that wasn’t crass enough, they have tilted the ‘e’ on their logo, and trained their staff to pronounce it ‘Chill Factor-ee’.
With such mangling of the English language, you would expect the website to be worth the effort they have gone to over the name. Frankly, it’s not. It’s gimmicky (the text is on a slope - geddit?) and hard to use. It doesn’t tell you basic stuff such as which hours are off-peak, and when you complete an enquiry form the message disappears into cyberspace (or else they simply ignore it).
Well never mind all that. Have they got it right in other, some would say more important, respects? I decided to find out today. It is certainly very popular - booking is essential even on a weekday afternoon. They tell you to arrive an hour earlier than your allotted time, which is unnecessary in my experience. So having picked up my lift pass I sat drinking coffee and watching the fun from the cosy cafe overlooking the slope.
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