Vail’s new Epic Mix pass, set to roll out at Keystone this November, is a unique concept that will bring a foursquare-esque check-in experience to skiing & riding.
How it Works
The idea is both simple and brilliant. Starting this November, the prolific Epic pass will come equipped with its very own RFID chip, allowing skiers and riders to board the lifts without pulling out their passes. This in itself isn’t a new idea; some of the Epic resorts have been piloting RFID lift tickets for a couple of seasons now.
The innovative part of the equation is the social layer being built with all the data that the system collects. Each time a skier boards a lift, they are technically performing a Foursquare like check-in. All of this data is then accessible via the EpicMix website or in real-time on the EpicMix iPhone & Android apps, which are set to roll out in the next month. Skiers and riders can then unlock “pins” (think Foursquare badges) for different accomplishments, view stats on their runs, share their location with friends via the mobile apps, and compete for spots on the leaderboard (Who skied the most days? Who had the most vertical in a given day?) Of course, all of this can be pushed to Twitter and Facebook in the form of status updates.
Will it take off?
In many ways a ski resort is an excellent place for a social network to flourish, even if the growth potential is limited. Ski resorts are somewhat insular and self-contained, kind of like the colleges and universities where Facebook initially got its footing. A lot of people come and go, which will help to spread the idea (and perhaps pressure other resorts to roll out something similar.)
And adoption is easy, because the hardware (the pass) and the check-ins (boarding a lift) are both mandatory and passive. The data is collected either way, whether you login and interact is your choice. The smartphone apps have some pretty enticing “gateway” features – a built in trail map, weather and real-time conditions information, alerts from the ski area, the ability to see where your friends are, and a handful of other useful features. Over the past few seasons, a number of skiing & riding smartphone apps have really taken off – a “resort-official” app like this (all location features aside) could really dominate.
My guess is that there are a good number of skiers and riders, who are pretty tech-savvy as a bunch and often competitive by nature, might just eat this up.
Update: Unsurprisingly, there are some naysayers out there who are suspicious of the motives of such a program. Not an uncommon thing when we are talking about location data and check-ins. Skiers and riders on some message boards seem worried that this will allow the resort to track individuals who choose to ski out of bounds. An interesting product has popped up, too – skipassdefender.com.
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Well written article. Epicmix and future systems like it hold much promise. It is a like a game on the mountain, and an information hub. Phone apps are convenient for the user, and feed many types of data back to the company when installed on a phone. This can happen even when the app is not on.
As for the future, look for development of these systems to use a RFID pass as a room key, or a “stored-value” resort charge (Aspen). And this gives me significant hesitation. Aside from the potential tracking or monitoring, RFID was never meant as a secure system, it was designed to be an open tracking/identification/inventory system. All security patches are designed as firewalls or gateways. A lift scanner employee getting paid 8 bucks an hour asks my birthdate or hometown as a “challenge question”. I don’t really like that. Up until this point there hasn’t been much incentive for a hackers/criminals to break in the door. However, the more info which is behind the door, the more incentive there is to get in. And certainly the more info the resort has to use, sell, or trade.
I’m excited for the Epic Pass 2.0 great ideas!
Thanks for the comment, Jon. I agree that EpicMix holds a lot of potential. That being said, I’m not about to stand in staunch defense of RFID because it clearly has some inherent flaws. I don’t see EpicMix posing much of a risk in its current iteration, but who knows what kind of functionality (and what kind of data) they will choose to add to it in the future.
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