As anyone who has recently visited a large ski resort knows, high-touch (and high-cost) ski concierge services are hot these days. Destination resorts are going all out to attend to customers’ every need and keep them comfortable. To that end, California’s Northstar-at-Tahoe ski resort offers its guests season-long ski-storage and locker-room services. In an effort to raise the convenience level even more, the resort recently began issuing RFID-enabled cards for accessing those services.
Located just north of Lake Tahoe, Northstar-at-Tahoe offers 83 groomed trails on 2,490 acres, and is owned by ski-area operator Booth Creek Ski Holdings. The resort worked with Gantner, an Austrian RFID systems integrator specializing in recreational and sports-related applications of RFID, to develop and install the RFID technology at the resort. The system became operational last ski season, and is being expanded this coming season to include an additional level of service.
Here’s how the system works: Families or groups of up to four people can purchase access to locker and gear-storage rooms, good for the entire winter season. For $199, they can choose Bronze Level storage, which provides access to a secure storage room where they can lock up their boots, poles and other gear in an assigned storage rack and store it until their next visit. Those willing to invest $1,500 for the Gold Level, or $2,000 for the Platinum Level (new for the 2006/07 season), will have access to a large locker that provides enough space for all their gear, and also sports built-in boot driers so guests won’t have to worry about returning to the slopes the following day in wet boots. Subscribers at the Gold and Platinum level can also enjoy the use of a private lounge, offering entertainment and refreshments.
When purchasing a season locker or gear-storage membership, each group or family member is issued a credit-card-sized plastic card with an embedded 13.56 MHz passive RFID inlay made by Legic Identsystems. The inlays comply with the ISO 15693 air-interface standard, as does the Legic RFID interrogator installed in each entrance door to the locker and storage rooms, and each individual locker door and storage rack. Once the group or family selects a desired locker or rack, an employee activates each person’s card so it will unlock the entrance door and that individual’s locker or ski rack. For the Gold and Platinum members, the card can also be used to open the lounge door.
Each locker’s reader and lock are battery-operated, and the readers are not networked together; rather, each reader is programmed to allow the locker to be opened only when the unique ID number encoded to the specific renter’s card is presented. Also encoded to the card is a range of dates during which the reader can accept the card ID. After the end date—which Northstar will program as the last day of the winter season—the locker will no longer unlock when the card is presented. The following season, a new batch of cards will be issued to season locker holders, and the interrogators will be reprogrammed to read them within a set range of dates.
Many season locker holders are also season lift-ticket holders, and Northstar could easily combine the programs, so that a person renting a locker would have an inlay embedded into their season lift-ticket instead of being issued a separate Legic card. Northstar could also migrate its current bar-code system for checking ski passes with an RFID-based system, wherein skiers and snowboarders would just pass through a turnstile at the chairlift entrance, which the readers would unlock after each read of a valid ski pass read—a popular scheme in Europe.
Andy Buckley, Northstar’s director of resort experience, says the resort is not presently moving in that direction, however, for two main reasons. First, it has already invested a large sum of money in the bar-code system, which enables chair-lift operators to employ a handheld bar-code scanner to verify each ticket. Second, the manual ticket-check process also enables staff to interact with each visitor—to ask how that person’s day is going, for example, as well as check if he or she has any questions or problems. With an automated RFID system, Buckley says, the resort would lose this level of customer interaction.
On the other hand, Buckley says, using RFID to access lockers and storage rooms is very convenient to the resort’s visitors, who can place the cards in hip pockets, close to the level of the door handles on the main entrances, so the reader can pick up the card’s encoded ID. Once the door unlocks, a visitor can open it with a free hand, rather than putting down skis or other gear and fishing a key out of a pocket, as was previously necessary. “The RF cards are sleeker [than mechanical keys],” Buckley states, “and in the locker room, we don’t need a high level of human interaction for customer service.”