I’m totally onboard with Vail ski resort starting to implement social media into their marketing.  The demand is there… skiiers are younger, affluent, and certainly ontop of technology.  They turn to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube for everything else, why not reach them where they are?

Other ski resorts need to adopt this model if they want to stay cool (no-pun-intended).

Imagine the next step of this…  Not only can you have a conversation with the resort, but you can be informed of cheap lift tickets ahead of time, you can know up-to-the minute snow reports…  you can then be riding up the 5 – 10 minute lift rides, reading active twitter updates on which runs were just freshly groomed, which just opened, etc.  Ready for lunch? Pull out your phone and see today’s menu’s for on-mountain dining. Finish lunch and check to see the wait-times at lifts.  Done for the day?  Check out which ski-in lodge is holding the best happy hour and share it with your ski buddies immediately. Integrate and RFID tag into the season passes… just imagine the possibilities.

So much opportunity for ski resorts… I wish Killington & Pico in Vermont would begin to use this – it would make it much more appealing to stay on the East Coast instead of traveling out west.  In fact, I wish I could implement this all for Killington & Pico so I could spend some days actually skiing this year!