You may have noticed a silver dog-bone-shaped sticker on the back of your season pass this year. It is an RFID tag in support of a pilot project we are running at Telemark this year. It allows us to automatically detect when a season pass moves past the lodge, permitting us to gather anonymous visit statistics. We don’t know specifically who the tag belongs to — we will NEVER track people at Telemark without your permission! But we can tell when “someone” arrives and how long they stay on the property each time that “someone” visits. From this data we can compile, for example:
- Usage by hour/day/week/month/season
- How many super-keeners come nearly every day
- How many people come at least once per week, and which days they come
This is just a pilot project, to see what we can learn that will help us manage and improve the club. Some thoughts about how the club might benefit:
- lodge staffing
- grooming schedule
- grants and corporate sponsors, because we will have exact numbers rather than dubious generic “industry standards”
- marketing
- affiliations with other local partners such as the Westbank Chamber of Commerce
But we really have no idea what we might discover. To our knowledge, this is the first time this technology has been deployed in a Nordic club in North America. (If you know of others, please drop us a note because we would love to chat with them!)
Thanks to the 2 Engineering / Computer Science UBC recent grads who donated their time to design and write the software for this project. The equipment was provided on loan from Canmore-based Zone 4. The RFID expertise was provided by Dallas-based Codesource LLC.
