There are days when a snowboarder may feel like a can of creamed corn - and now he or she may be scanned just like one passing through a grocery checkout, as high-tech tickets and smartcards hit the slopes.
The days of simply punching a hole into a paper ticket are numbered. Resorts are turning to optical and radio frequency-based scanning technologies to reduce lift lines, cut personnel costs, and crack down on ticket counterfeiting. Some progressive ski conglomerates, like the American Skiing Company of Bethel, Maine, are even introducing smartcards that guests can use to buy lift tickets, lessons, lunch, and lip balm.
The emphasis on high-tech ticketing is still fairly new to the North American skiing industry and is partly a result of the consolidation that has swept the industry over the past few years.
A handful of publicly-traded and deep-pocketed mega-operators, like American Skiing Company, Vail Resorts, Booth Creek Ski Holdings, and Canada-based Intrawest, are seeking higher profits through ticketing technology, not to mention computer-coordinated snowmaking and even grooming vehicles with computer-assisted steering.
American Skiing Company, for example, spent US$2.4 million before the start of the 1997-98 season to install a new ticketing system at its seven New England resorts.
"We're trying to remove the hassle factor from skiing at our mountains," said Kathleen Willis, an American Skiing Company spokeswoman. "You can now visit the ticket window once in the season, buy a direct-to-lift pass, and that's it." The pass can be linked to a credit card or have funds loaded onto it, and be used to pay for everything, from ski school to an apres ski cocktail. "And you can get passes for your kids that are connected to Dad's credit card, if you're that brave," Willis added.
Skiers at ASC resorts, which include Killington and Sugarbush in Vermont and Sunday River and Sugarloaf in Maine, also accumulate "frequent skier" points on their passes based on how much they spend - redeemable for more lift passes.
Once they approach a lift, skiers with direct-to-lift passes get scanned by a handheld device, which sends a radio frequency signal to the chip embedded in the credit-card sized pass. The pass itself can be in a pocket, as it doesn't have to be visible to be read. The scanner relays the data it receives to a nearby node, which proceeds to query a central server as to whether the pass is valid. If it is, within seconds the lift attendant's scanner will indicate that the skier can board the lift.
Some resorts are angling to get rid of the ticket checker's job entirely. At Montana's Big Sky resort, skiers with season passes go through a turnstile that automatically determines whether their pass is valid and then clicks them through.
But even Big Sky's advanced ticketing system, developed by Austria's SkiData AG, doesn't mean that some poor ski bum is out of a job. "We still have employees there to show people how to use the system, even if there's no one there punching or scanning tickets," said Big Sky spokeswoman Sarah Healey. "But the SkiData system gives us more flexibility in our staffing - an employee can be walking around, managing the lift area, and taking care of problems."
Where ski areas may be able to cut down on staffing is at the ticket window. If more skiers opt to purchase smartcards that are good for an extended period of time, that means fewer visits to the ticket window - thus, shorter lines and fewer cashiers.
"Smartcards also reduce the hassle of using cash," observed Mark Danemann, president of Sirius Software in Taos, New Mexico, which has installed cutting-edge ticketing systems at 42 North American ski areas. "And it gets people to spend more. It's like using a credit card instead of cash - you don't pay attention to the outflow of money, and skiing is an expensive sport."
But others question whether ski areas will see enough of a return on investment from the smartcards. The cards themselves cost about a dollar each, and thus aren't yet well-suited to single-day lift tickets, which typically are priced between $35 and $50.
"Given that these devices are expensive, and a polypropylene ticket costs a penny, that's a big investment," said Klaas Sybranda of Intouch Technology, a Santa Barbara, California, company that just installed a ticketing system at California's Mammoth Mountain, one of the country's largest ski areas. "One of the things that smartcards and radio frequency checking are supposed to do is eliminate fraud, but I'm not sure the amount of fraud justifies the expense."
But Sybranda says that as the cost of the smartcards drops - as it is virtually certain to do - it may make sense for more ski areas, especially if the cards can be recycled.
There are other benefits to the high-end technology. As skiers are scanned, ski areas can run reports on traffic patterns - discovering which lifts are most popular at which times of day. That information may be used to assign the right number of employees to different parts of the mountain, or even decide where to install a new lift. And American Skiing Company is hoping that its new set-up, from Lasergate Systems of Clearwater, Florida, will eliminate one of the big problems of any ski area: lost children.
The old fashioned way of tracking down errant tykes was to write messages on blackboards near the lift boarding area. But now, American Skiing Company staffers can query the ticket system to find out which lift a child last boarded, and when, giving them a rough sense of where to find the lost kid.
The ultimate goal of the new generation of ticketing systems isn't to replace the trusty Saint Bernard, though. It's to bring ski areas into the 1990s, providing the financial reporting systems that will help them eke more profit out of an industry that has long been stagnant. "These systems allow resort operators to manage the real-time cash input to the resort," says Jacqueline Socghtig, president and CEO of Lasergate Systems. "At the end of the day, they're competing with everyone else for discretionary dollars."
How well do the new systems work? Healey at Big Sky says her mountain never had lift lines before, and doesn't have them now. Some ski areas, like Colorado's Breckenridge, have found that their supermarket-style optical scanners can cause tie-ups as skiers figure out how to use them. ASC, for the moment, is reserving judgment as its busy holiday season arrives.
"This is the big test," says ASC's Willis. "Call me on January 7th, and I'll have a much better understanding of how well it works."
