4-page Case Study - Posted 6/26/2009

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Vail Resorts

Resort Streamlines Skier Check-In, Improves Data Collection with RF Technology

Enhancing the guest experience is central to the corporate mission at Vail Resorts, but ski lift pass authentication for season pass holders was often a time-consuming process due to passes being worn under layers of winter clothing. In addition, the company had little visibility into the skiing patterns of its guests. Vail Resorts switched to season passes embedded with radio frequency (RF) tags that can be scanned through a skier’s jacket, streamlining the pass-holder authentication process. The company also placed RF scanners on upper-mountain lifts to capture lift access data that helps sharpen targeted marketing. The solution uses Microsoft® BizTalk® Server RFID and SQL Server® 2005 to handle authentication transactions, SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services for data analysis, and Windows® Communication Foundation for point-to-point data exchange.

Situation

Vail Resorts is the leading mountain resort company in North America, operating 5 of the 10 most visited ski resorts in the United States. The company employs nearly 15,000 seasonal and year-round employees during peak periods. Vail Resorts sums up its corporate mission in just four words: “Extraordinary Resorts. Exceptional Experiences.” Says Robert Urwiler, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Vail Resorts, “The corporate mission is about providing the best experiences that we can to our customers in every part of their interaction.”

So when the company needed to replace aging handheld scanner technology used to read bar-coded ski lift tickets and passes, “we saw it as an opportunity to raise the bar in how we interact with customers, as well as [improve] our overall customer insight capabilities,” says Urwiler. “If we had to spend the money to replace this technology, we wanted to create some level of competitive differentiation in the process.”

The previous scanning technology presented a number of challenges. The Vail Resorts mountain segment—consisting of Colorado’s Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, and Keystone resorts, plus Heavenly in Nevada and California—attracts an average of 1.2 million unique skiers each season. Hundreds of thousands of these guests purchase season passes, accounting for roughly a third of Vail Resorts total lift revenue. At the resorts’ base ski lifts, which serve as primary access points to the mountains, staff members used handheld technology to scan the bar codes of both paper lift tickets and season passes, interacting with a back-end database to confirm that each ticket or pass was valid.

The bar codes required a line-of-sight alignment to be scanned by the handheld scanners, so, for the vast majority of guests, the Vail Resorts staff had to hold the passes steady in their hands in order to ensure successful scans. During this process, staff members also visually inspected the season passes, which carried a picture of the guest, to ensure that the skier was the owner of the pass. The line-of-sight requirement meant passes had to be in clear view, so many skiers had to unzip their clothes to produce passes for inspection. For families skiing with young children, digging out everyone’s passes while holding ski poles could be a time-consuming, clumsy operation.

Besides creating a less-than-optimal guest experience at the beginning of a skier’s time on the slopes, the existing system did not give Vail Resorts any real insight into a guest’s general terrain preferences. Vail operates more than 130 lifts on its five mountains, but because it scanned guests only at its base lifts, it was impossible to know if guests spent their day skiing extreme terrain at high altitudes or stayed near the base of the mountain on the easiest slopes.

With a guest pool consisting of many different levels of skiing expertise and interest, such activity-based data is useful for allocating labor and for knowing which trails to open or close at different times. The data is also beneficial for customer segmentation efforts that support targeted marketing, and it can be used to further enhance the guest experience by building up more accurate guest profiles.

Solution

The solution chosen by Vail Resorts uses radio frequency (RF) technology to streamline pass scanning processes and gather valuable guest lift-use patterns. After a proof of concept and pilot test of RF passes with nearly 1,000

With the ability to record that a guest has boarded an upper lift in a totally noninvasive way, we can better understand real customer patterns. Robert Urwiler Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Vail Resorts

Vail Resorts invested in new handheld scanners from Intermec and also installed fixed RF scanners on several strategically selected upper-mountain ski lifts throughout the resorts. The handheld scanners render the pass holder’s picture along with relevant identification information and emit different audible tones for different types of passes, which helps staffers confirm identity without needing to move close enough to examine the actual pass.

Vail Resorts runs its handheld scanning application on the Windows Mobile® 5.0 operating system. The passive scanning solution, using fixed RF scanners attached to ski lifts, employs the Microsoft® BizTalk® Server RFID feature of BizTalk Server 2006 R2 to gather RF data, and uses BizTalk Server Enterprise Edition and Branch Edition as the primary application integration broker for data and reporting applications, including Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Standard Edition data management software and its SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Windows® Communication Foundation is used to facilitate messaging to downstream systems that may be interested in RF data attributes. All integration services were built on Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5, using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 development system.

Vail Resorts has long used EMC Consulting Services to develop custom business solutions using Microsoft technology, and for this solution EMC provided custom development and integration services.

Benefits

By adopting its new radio frequency solution, Vail Resorts streamlined the authentication process for season pass holders and enhanced the process further by providing staff members with guest-specific information that they can use to personalize interactions. The solution also improves fraud detection capabilities. In addition, Vail Resorts expanded its ability to gather valuable guest activity data in a noninvasive way and is using this data to improve its customer segmentation and targeted marketing.

Future benefits could include better understanding of skier traffic patterns for more efficient allocation of Vail Resorts staff, guest-specific communications delivered via electronic signage or other methods, and other personalized services that further benefit the guest experience.

Enhancing the Guest Experience

Vail Resorts both streamlined the authentication process for season pass owners and provided scanning staffers with a wealth of guest information that they can use to personalize interactions. Using the information displayed on their new handheld devices, staffers can greet guests by name and have access to activity-based information such as how often the guest has skied this season.

Both customer surveys and anecdotal information reflect guests’ enthusiasm for the Easy Scan solution. Guests have been pleasantly surprised at not having to dig their passes out of their ski jackets in order to be scanned. “We’ve heard nothing but positive feedback, both from customers and from the scanning staff who are out there every day interacting with customers,” says Urwiler.

The new solution improves Vail Resorts’ fraud detection capabilities. Because passes now contain unique RF tags, they are much more difficult to counterfeit. In addition, the increased range of the RF reader makes the photo matching process less intrusive for guests. “It is against the rules to share a season pass, but there are people who attempt to do this every year so we take it pretty seriously,” says Urwiler.

Urwiler reports that fraud detection numbers are up significantly this season compared with prior years, “and we attribute part of that improvement to the new technology.”

Gathering Valuable Customer Data Without Intruding on Guests

Vail Resorts is gathering valuable guest activity data from the scanners on its upper mountain lifts. “With the ability to record that a guest has boarded an upper lift in a totally noninvasive way, we can better understand real customer patterns without having to impose additional scanning steps on the guest,” says Urwiler. “We believe that’s unique in the ski industry today.”

Tim April, IT Director at Vail Resorts, reports that the company has achieved an 85 percent detection rate with these fixed scanners. Vail Resorts is pleased with this detection rate and also by the fact that it is not getting any false positive reads from its upper-mountain lift readers. “If we picked you up on the lift for a terrain park, that tells us something about the type of terrain you are interested in. As we obtain more reads at various lifts, we can build up a more accurate profile over time,” says April.

Because Vail Resorts trusts the data, it feels confident using it for customer segmentation and tailored marketing efforts. “If you are a snowboarder who spends all of your time in a terrain park, we might communicate with you in a different manner than we would a high-altitude advanced skier,” says Urwiler. “The words and images that we would use might be different and much more relevant to you.”

Vail Resorts runs a number of microcampaigns throughout the ski season, culminating in efforts during the spring to “encourage our guests to renew season passes while snow is still on their minds,” says Urwiler. “We’re working very actively with our marketing organization regarding applications for the new information to our customer segmentation and campaign process.”

The solution’s scalability and flexibility will support future benefits as well. With data from additional lift-mounted scanners, Vail Resorts can improve its understanding of traffic patterns on different lifts throughout the day, allowing the company to deploy its staff more effectively.

Urwiler notes that Microsoft software has been central to the Easy Scan program’s success and expects the software to be central to future benefits. “Microsoft products and technologies, including BizTalk Server RFID, are a core part of our Easy Scan program and provide the basis for some of the competitive advantage that we are achieving,” Urwiler says.

Adds April, “One of the challenges with a broad RF deployment is the sheer volume of data that it produces, along with how you filter the data and interact with your in-the-field readers. However, using BizTalk Server RFID, a feature of a product that we were familiar with, gave us comfort that we could scale and manage the volumes of data that we’re currently dealing with—as well as what it would scale up to if we were getting reads from as many as 130 lifts. That gives us a lot of comfort in the scalability of the entire solution.”

The solution’s scalability is crucial now that Vail Resorts has seen how RF technologies can streamline operations, facilitate greater insight, and contribute to enhanced guest experiences. “This solution is providing us with a platform for better customer service and better customer interactions,” says Urwiler. “Our ability to fulfill on our promise of providing exceptional experiences at our extraordinary resorts is there to a much higher degree than ever before.”

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For more information about Vail Resorts products and services, call (303) 404-1800 or visit the Web site at:
www.vailresorts.com