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Thomas Brennick, a skier since the age of 4, is now enjoying regular trips to the Black Mountain of New Hampshire with his two grandchildren.
“It’s back to the old days,” he said on a recent sunny Friday of the Summit Double chair. “It’s just a good, old time at its best.”
Behind the scenes, the experience is now powered by a high-tech system designed to increase the efficiency of the oldest skiing area of the state. And although small, independent resorts cannot compete on infrastructure or buy power with conglomerates such as Vail, which owns nearby Atitash Mountain Resort and seven others in the Northeast alone, at least one entrepreneur will be a great equalist “.
The businessman is Erik Mogensen, who bought Black Mountain last year and turned it into a laboratory for his ski mountain consultant, Entabeni Systems. The company builds systems that sell lift tickets, lesson bookings and equipment rent online while collecting detailed data to inform decisions, such as where to make more snow and how much.
“Many general drivers will go and see how many rows of cars are parked, and that’s kind of how they tell how busy they are,” Mogensen said. “We really want to look at the transactional data to the deepest level.”
This includes analyzing everything from the most popular time to sell sausage rolls in the lodge to how many runs a season pass holder makes per visit.
“The big operators, they can do many things on scale we can’t do. They can buy 20 snow cats at a time, 10 chairs, those kinds of things. We can’t do it, but we’re really smooth,” Mogensen said. “We can decide to change the way we take care of very quickly, or change the way we open routes, or to change our (food and drink) menu in the middle of a day.”
Transform a small time resort
Mogensen, who says his happiest moments were linked to skiing, started in 2015 Entabeni Systems, powered by the desire to keep the sport accessible. In 2023 he bought the company Indy Pass, which allows buyers to ski two days each at 230 independent skiing areas, including Black Mountain. It is an alternative to the epic and Ikon-Multi-Resort Pass offered by the VAIL and Alterra Conglomerate.
Black Mountain was an early participant in Indy Pass. When Mogensen learned that it was at risk, he was reminded of the long-standing ski area of his hometown. He bought Black Mountain with the aim of finally turning it into a cooperative.
Many Indy Pass Resorts are also clients of Entabeni systems, including Utah’s Beaver Mountain, who consider himself the longest continuous mountains in the US family
Kristy Seeholzer, whose husband’s grandfather Beaver Mountain founded, said Entabeni streamlined his ticket and seasonal system. This led to new, lower prices for those who were willing to ski during vacationing or weekends, she said.
‘Many of our seasonal pace holders were self -limiting anyway. They just want to ski weekdays because they don’t want to handle weekends, ‘she said. “We could never have been watching it by hand.”
Although she is generally happy, Seeholzer said the software could be challenging and slow.
‘There are some wonderful programs out there, such as on the retail side of things or the sale side of things. And one of the things that was a little frustrating was that it felt like we found out the wheel again, ‘she said.
Not everyone is a fan
Sam Shirley, 25, grew up in New Hampshire and worked as a ski instructor and ski school director in Maine while at university. But he said that increasing technology changed the way he ski drastically, and forced him to switch to cross country mostly.
“As a customer, it made things more complicated,” he said. “It’s just getting an extra effort.”
Shirley used to make the effort to enjoy some travel in New England, but was turned off by skiing areas by lower rates for those ahead of tickets. He doesn’t like to provide detailed contact information, sometimes even a photo, just to get a lift ticket.
It is not just independent skiing areas focused on technology and data. Many others use his cards and passes embedded with radio frequency identification chips that detect skiers’ movements.
Vail Resorts pings -cell phones to better understand how lifts form, which inform staff decisions, says John Plack, director of communications. The lifting times have decreased each year over the past three years, with 97% below 10 minutes this year, he said.
“Our business is a very data hourly enterprise. We know a lot of our gas set. We know their taste. We know what they would like to ski, we know when they want to ski. And we can use the data to really improve the guest experience,” he said.
How the big guys fight slight winters
The improvement costs it. A one -day ticket at Vail’s Keystone Resort in Colorado sold for $ 292 last week. A seasonal pass costs $ 418, a potentially good deal for Die Hard Skiers, but also a reliable revenue stream that VAIL guarantees a certain amount of income, even if skiing areas are less snow and shorter winters.
The revenue from such passes, especially the Epic Pass, with a multi-resort, allowed the company to invest $ 100 million in snow, Plack said.
“By going to the season in advance, it gives us certainty and lets us reinvest in our resorts,” he said.
However, Mogensen insists that greater is not always better. Lift tickets at Black Mountain cost $ 59 to $ 99 a day and a season’s pace is about $ 450.
“You don’t just come to skiing to turn left and right. You come ski because of the way the hot chocolate tastes and the way the fire pit smells and what the spring ski is and how the beer tastes and who you are in the area, ‘he said. ‘Skiing doesn’t have to be a luxurious stuff. It could be a community center. ‘
Brennick, the Black Mountain Lift rider skiing with his grandchildren, said he had noticed a difference since the ski area was sold.
“I can see the change,” he said. “They make a lot of snow and it shows.”
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Ramer reports of Concord, New Hampshire.
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