For the past 40 years, big-ticket donors to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Team have been rewarded with a gold medallion from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), allowing them to access nearly all American ski resorts. This year, USSA is doing something different: It is embedding radio frequency identification in the passes. The enhanced functionality of the latest medallion is a nod to the trend of ski resorts installing high-frequency (HF) or ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID readers at their lifts.
This coming season’s Gold Pass—available to donors contributing $10,000 or more—will contain two RFID inlays enabling them to recognized by any of the readers installed at ski lifts across the United States. Until recently, an RFID tag would not get skiers very far at most resorts, since few used any technology other than bar-code scanners. But in recent years, says Kate Klingsmith, USSA’s assistant director of Gold Pass development, a sufficient number of resorts have RFID readers in place, enabling skiers to access lifts faster and easier, that USSA felt it would be a great advantage to Gold Pass holders.
In fact, approximately 30 resorts now have either HF or UHF readers installed for lift access control, point-of-sale transactions or other features for skiers, according to John Collins, the product manager at Denver technology and media company Active Network (formerly known as RTP), which provided the Gold Pass, as well as the software that stores medallion numbers and shares that information with each resort’s lift-access and ticket-window operations. The firm has provided the software service to USSA for the past decade, though this is the first year that it has also been responsible for providing the pass itself.
The Gold Pass has been a 40-year tradition, thanking U.S. Ski Team donors by authorizing access to most American ski resorts for up to 50 visits at each location for the duration of the ski season, which begins in October. Up to 400 are distributed annually, Klingsmith reports. The pass is a gold-colored medallion that a donor can wear around his or her neck or carry in a pocket, she says, adding that donors often comprise individual companies or groups that that may then share the pass with other organizations, or with their own employees or clients. For the past several decades, a bar code has been printed on the medallion’s front. When a user arrives at a resort, the facility’s staff members recognize the Gold Pass by sight, granting lift access, but they typically also record the visit—usually by scanning the bar code—in order to ensure that the number of visits does not extend beyond the allotted 50. “That’s really to be fair to the resorts,” Klingsmith explains, since none of the facilities are compensated for the visits, but rather offer the service as a favor to USSA.With the new RFID-enabled medallion—which will now be made of plastic instead of metal, to enable better RF transmission—the resort can opt to read the Gold Pass’ RFID inlays, in order to make the entrance process easier and faster. Active Network provides the software used at ski resorts for selling and managing lift tickets, as well as other goods and services, such as equipment rentals or lessons, purchased within the resort. It also supplies the Gold Pass. The company is embedding an HF inlay and a Zebra Technologies UHF inlay in each medallion, as well as integrating a bar code (for use at lifts that require bar-coded tickets), allowing Gold Pass holders to go directly to lifts at 65 percent of the 321 resorts belonging to the National Ski Areas Association.
The medallion’s two inlays, which are being provided by European access-control systems firm Skidata, are necessary because resorts use one of two types of RFID technology. The lift tickets issued by Vail Resorts‘ six ski areas contain EPC Gen 2 passive RFID tags (see Vail Picks New Line With UHF RFID-Powered Passes), while most other resorts using the technology have installed an HF solution (see Mammoth Mountain Plans Mammoth RFID Installation, Alta Opts for RFID Lift Tickets and Aspen Signs With Skidata, RTP for Integrated RFID/POS System). The HF systems are supplied by Skidata or Team Axess.
The Gold Pass will be utilized only to provide ski-lift access, though some resorts are using RFID for a variety of other services. For example, Vail Resorts links each ski pass’ unique identifier with data regarding the skier holding it, thereby enabling customers to not only access lifts but also track the number of vertical feet that they ski, earn points based on those numbers, and share their experience with others via social-media sites, such as Facebook (see Vail Resorts Links RFID with Social Media).
Within the medallion is an HF RFID inlay, a plastic middle layer that separates the two inlays, and a UHF inlay beneath that layer. Manufacturing medallions containing two different RFID inlays posed several challenges, says Sébastien Travelletti, Skidata’s head of business development, the greatest of which involved installing both inlays into a “reasonable, good-looking shape” that would fit into the pass. “The secret is the thickness of the different layers,” he states, “and in the know-how to combine these layers to get one solid piece of plastic.” Skidata spent a great deal of time on research and development, Travelletti says, drawing from the firm’s considerable experience with RFID inlays for access-control systems to engineer the Gold Pass technology.
Zebra’s patented UHF card inlay antenna design is optimized for card applications, explains Michael Fein, Zebra Technologies’ technical product manager for RFID, resulting in a long read range and high reliability. In addition, the antenna’s bowtie shape enables badges to be positioned horizontally or vertically without damaging the inlay with something such as a lanyard hole punch. “For this project, the inlay versatility allowed the HF tag to be placed in close proximity without affecting performance,” Fein says.
Regardless of which type of inlay a resort uses, the readers will capture the unique ID encoded to a medallion’s tags. The system, Klingsmith says, will then compare that number with the list of approximately 400 Gold Pass IDs, stored in its own database and shared with all resorts. However, the ID is not linked with any personal information about the medallion’s owner, but simply indicates that the bearer of that Gold Pass is authorized to enter. For that reason, he notes, the pass cannot be used for other purposes, such as making payments or tracking vertical miles.