More than just powder will be coating the mountains and chair lifts at Vail Resorts this fall. The Colorado-based company has unveiled a new social gaming app for its 2010-2011 ski and snowboard season that allows visitors to track their activities and share them with their friends and family — all via radio frequency (RF)-enabled chips embedded in their season passes and lift tickets.
The app, called EpicMix, is a cross between Nike+ and miCoach, which allow you to track your physical activities, and Gowalla, which rewards users for exploring new areas via its Trips feature. Like Gowalla, EpicMix rewards users with special pins for various accomplishments, such as being on the first chairlift of the day, or skiing a certain number of vertical feet over a designated period of time.
How It Works
What’s different (and especially impressive) about EpicMix is that it doesn’t require a smartphone or GPS-enabled device to participate, nor does it require familiarity with geolocation apps and the concept of “checking in.” Everything visitors need is already in their pass or lift ticket.
Employees will be stationed at the resorts’ various lifts (there are 89 across its five resorts in Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Heavenly) to scan the chips, which allows the application to automatically calculate the number of vertical feet skied, days on the mountain, routes taken and other feats. Guests can thus seamlessly and effortlessly keep track of their activities without having to fumble for their smartphones to check in at various locations — in other words, they can continue skiing and snowboarding the way they always have. Of course, visitors can also opt not to have their passes scanned.
To access their stats and the pins they’ve earned, participants will need to log in to the app via their desktops or a free mobile app for iPhone and Android devices. A third hybrid application is also available for other smartphones, including BlackBerrys. (The Vail Resorts team told us that most of their visitors are Blackberry users and that while the current BlackBerry OS is not robust enough to support all of the same features available to iPhone and Android users, they are hoping to improve on it in the future.)
Users can also use the apps to keep track of where their Facebook friends are at each of the resorts, create leaderboards to compare accomplishments, send private messages to organize meetups and share their activity with their social networks on Facebook, Facebook Places and Twitter. We can imagine that the the tracking feature will be especially useful for parents who want to monitor the whereabouts of their children’s ski classes.
Vail Resorts has also created a version of the app designed especially for kids under age 14, which boasts a separate set of pins and other content, as well as the ability to connect to their parents’ accounts and additional privacy restrictions.
Why We Like It
EpicMix delivers a terrific user experience that is sure to drive loyalty and engagement well beyond what the resort is currently able to offer via its newsletter and other communications channels. It also successfully repurposes the best of activity-tracking apps like Nike+ and miCoach, and social gaming apps like Gowalla and Foursquare in a personalized way, proving what a localized, medium-sized company can do with cutting-edge social and mobile technologies.
The app launches officially on opening day at Keystone Mountain on November 5.
What do you think of EpicMix? When do you think it’s better for companies to design campaigns within the parameters of location-based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, versus creating their own?
Reviews: Android, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter
More About: action sports, Android App, epicmix, foursquare, gowalla, iphone app, Nike, skiing, snowboarding, sports, vail resorts
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