Vail Resorts Links RFID With Social Media

Visitors with multi-resort passes will be able to view their stats from all resort visits on a single profile, and their vertical distance skied will be presented both as a grand total and per resort.

According to Urwiler, Vail Resorts' and ODIN employees working together to install and test the gantry-mounted readers, and then conduct tests to ensure that they would capture the ID of each tag-carrying visitor moving through the read zones. "We made sure to perform these tests while snow was still on the ground," he notes, since the moisture in the snow can affect RF signal transmission. Urwiler declines to reveal the number of RFID-enabled passes that the company could potentially read throughout a busy weekend day at all five resorts, though he does indicate that he and his staff have performed tests on their software systems to ensure they'll be able to process all of the data collected.

Visitors will have the option of disabling the RFID inlay in a season pass and Peaks card, but Urwiler declines to comment on whether the tags would be disabled physically (such as by placing the card in a metallic envelope that blocks out RF signals) or by using a password or other means to make the inlay impossible to read.

Vail Resorts, Urwiler says, has issued hundreds of thousands of RFID-enabled season passes and Peaks cards at its resorts during each of the last two seasons. That number could jump this season, he adds, if visitors take to the EpicMix system. "We think this is the evolution of the skiing industry," he states.

Vail Resorts is not the only company combining RFID technology with social media. This summer, a total of 6,500 Israeli teenagers attended an event known as Coca-Cola Village, all of whom utilized RFID technology to share their experiences with friends and family members via Facebook (see RFID Helps Make Friends for Israeli Teens).