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“Good morning, guests, and welcome to the Museum of Early 21st Century Ski Resort Artifacts. Step right up and experience the quaint tradition once known as a ticket booth line. It’s hard to believe, but the ticket line was often longer than the lift line. Then, skiers and riders struggled with how and where to click a strange little blue plastic thing onto a D-ring or zipper pull. Move on, then, and have a peek at the remarkably long and complex contract called the ‘rental shop agreement.’ The artifact itself was ‘printed’ on a material that was called paper. The yellow stick people used to fill in the blanks was known as a pencil.

“There were other clumsy requirements, too! Every time you arrived at a lift, someone had to check your ticket manually. Many guests had season’s passes that were tucked away inside their jackets, just like today, but then, they had to unzip and pull out the passes so that ‘ticket checkers’ could see them. There were lines to sign up for ski school, especially for parents with little kids. That’s how ski life once was, a long decade ago.”

Okay, so we’re not fully automated yet. But the revolution is here, and the instrument of change can be tucked into your twitching palm or your jacket pocket. The revolution is all about access and ease. It’s all about the handheld.

The revolution is furthest along at the liftline. This season, about 25 percent of American resorts have switched over to RFID lift access. Many more are pondering the move. “Flap gates” are replacing turnstiles at lifts.

And the revolution is spreading, albeit slowly, in other operations. Handhelds and tablets are replacing paper and pencils at ski schools and rental spots. It’s all about what the customer wants.

And the customer, as we all know, is all but married to his or her smartphone. Guests use them everywhere: they pull them out at the supermarket for their member points. They wave them at a screen at the department store for their loyalty discount. They check in with friends, stalk other friends, and keep track of the world, all through their phones. So it only makes sense that resorts get on board with that. And slowly, they are.

The happy news is that resorts are finding that while all this is good for the customer (and that should be enough to satisfy the industry), it’s good for the resort as well. With these automated systems comes a better and simpler tracking of customers in both real time and in an historical way. In addition, speeding up guest-handling processes allows employees to focus on customer relations and less on paperwork and policing. Handhelds are making resorts more customer-friendly.


THE VALUE IN RFID

Goodbye individual ticket checkers (often seen by customers, who resent the intrusion and lack of trust, as the “ticket police”) stationed at each lift; hello customer service agents mingling with guests mountainwide to find them what they need, help get what they want, and just plain put a face—and a voice—to the resort’s name.

And hello details on every move the customer makes, there for resorts to study and use.

“It was like a powder day for marketing folks like myself,” says Chris Rudolph, director of marketing services at Stevens Pass, Wash., of the moment his mountain went over to RFID and began culling information on customers. “We went from first grade to fifth in one day, since our systems were so arcane. It’s been remarkable.”

Because customers use a card for entry and can reload it (and are asked at purchase point if they’d like to supply e-mail, zip code, and other information, if they are not season’s passholders), resorts like Stevens can watch activity in many ways. Which zip codes come most often (and when)? Which trails do folks tend to head toward on certain days or at certain times? A great deal of useful information becomes accessible.

Of course, that means a change in the marketing department, Rudolph notes. “The convergence between IT and marketing is undeniable,” he says. “The lines will get more and more blurry.”

Larry Williams, president of Axess Systems, also sees the change to access gates as valuable in many ways. Aside from cutting down on ticket fraud, he points out that RFID reloadable tickets are environmentally responsible, too. Since they can be reloaded hundreds of times, customers are encouraged to hold onto them and reuse them for as long as possible. That engenders a sense of loyalty as well.

He’s hot, too, on the notion of removing the “ticket police.” While he says that initially some resorts worried that RFID gates would reduce employees’ face time with guests, the opposite is true. “You can change that position from ticket police to a true helper. They can give directions, offer help, whatever is needed. It’s a much more positive use of staff. Look, people are not there to chit-chat with the ticket checker. But a guest service host? That’s different,” he says.


TIP OF THE ICEBERG

Of course, the key is not just having that information, but knowing what to do with it. A good example, Rudolph says, was when his resort increased college pass prices by $50. Right away, through the data they could mine, the resort saw that private-college students didn’t balk, but public-college students did. The area saw a significant drop in college passes overall, so the price was dropped this year. “We expect to get more volume again,” Rudolph says.

Still, resorts are just beginning to tap the potential of handheld devices. Michael McDermott, executive vice president of RTP, points out that handhelds have been around resorts for quite some time, used mostly for inventory and ticket checking. But the uses are growing. By taking these and other tasks and moving them to a smarter platform, such as a tablet, resorts can reduce the number of those back-room employee positions and create teams of what McDermott calls “power guest service agents,” or, in laymen’s terms: employees who can handle any situation that comes up, right then and there.

“Imagine this,” says McDermott. “There’s a blue sky and fresh snow and all you want to do is get out there and ski. You have your pass, but you’ve brought along a friend who does not.” In the bad old days, you had to wait with your friend while he plodded through the line at the ticket window, watching as others caught first tracks. “Now, you can step right up to the liftline and make the purchase right there,” he says.

Like Williams, McDermott touts the “reloading” that evergreen passes offer. Guests purchase a “lift ticket” or pass (now in the shape of a sort of credit card you tuck into your pocket). When the prepaid purchase expires—be it a season’s pass, multi-day ticket, or $200 credit for purchases across the resort— customers are notified and, in an instant, can reload their cards and continue to ski, ride, and buy the stuff they want.

There is also, McDermott points out, the ability to interface with customers in a real-time way via Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and more. “We can build a better relationship with the guest through all this,” he says.

But the real change, even revolution, will come at the entrance to the resorts, McDermott says: “We see a huge transformation in the design of resorts’ front gates [in the near future]. You don’t need the castle gates for control anymore. Now it’s more about making the first impression in a more natural way. That’s going to have a profound impact on everything happening within the entire resort.”

Cases in point: Classic scenes, like rental and ski school lines, will change. These are arguably the most frustrating for both customers and resorts—who wants their newbies to face multiple long lines? With tablets, employees will be able to approach customers and tap their data in quickly. Even better, customers will be able to supply their information ahead of time via their own handhelds, and resorts will be able to store that information and have it at the ready any time the customer returns.

Williams, too, sees more coming in the future—and all we have to do to see it, he adds, is look to Japan and Europe. Resorts there have already installed more sophisticated RFID systems, with antennae on both sides of the customer, so they can carry their pass nearly anywhere on their bodies. There will be more shared passes between multiple resorts, as there are in Europe.

For example, Williams says, the Superski Dolomiti region in Italy includes 12 separate resorts. But they share one pass. As skiers and riders use the lifts, their information is stored. Then, the 12 resorts split the revenues based on where the customer went. Williams says more of that has to happen in the States, since it will give customers more options, freedom and ease.


THE FUTURE IS COMING

Think all of this is several years down the road? Think again. David Amirault, currently Aspen’s interactive marketing manager, has been on the cutting edge of technological change in the winter resort business for more than a decade. Yet even he is surprised at how fast innovations are coming along. “I don’t think anyone could have predicted how much we’ve come to rely on our handheld devices such as smartphones,” he says.

Besides marketing, he adds, handhelds allow resorts to “address situations in real time.” Rather than get notified and have to zip into the office to find out more, managers and other employees can click onto their handhelds and deal with situations then and there.

The limiting factor at present, Amirault points out, is that cell reception is not the greatest in many mountain areas. “We have to do better with connectivity to the devices,” he says. “The network and power to cover them have to improve in rural areas.” (As if on cue, his cell dropped the call at that moment in our interview.) Some of the improvement in connectivity will happen, he adds, as companies upgrade from 3G to 4G networks.

And when they do, Amirault sees a future in which customers (and employees) carry one piece of media for all their communications. But he warns that resorts need to be careful and thoughtful in moving toward this time. Think of what the customer wants and uses, what your staff needs to do their jobs better and faster, and then adapt to that, rather than trying to create another system. “We as an industry need to focus heavily on something like Google Wallet,” he says. “If we don’t pay attention to how the customer wants to use the systems, we won’t succeed. The ‘if we build it they will come’ model really doesn’t work for me in this instance.”

Still, he acknowledges that ski resorts are unique, and really “cannot go to any off-the-shelf solutions” for all tasks. Still, he says, when developing services for customers, “It’s important we look at what society is using as we develop our tools.”

The future is new, it’s innovative, it’s handheld, and it’s coming. Quickly.

“Before you leave the Museum, be sure to check out some other great exhibits. Like the good-looking ski school director with the Aussie accent. Or the quaint mountaintop shack serving fresh muffins and waffles. Or the lovely, peaceful tree-skiing trails.”

A little girl interjects. “Um, Mr. Guide? I was just skiing yesterday, and they still have all that stuff you just said. The shack. The trees. The Aussie character.”

“That’s right, little lady. New technology has made the experience better, and easier to obtain. But the true spirit of skiing? That’s forever.”