Dear Vail Resorts Leadership,

Please stop treating your valued customers as if they are criminals when your new scanning system fails.

For some reason, you felt pressured to move to a Bluetooth pass system without proper testing. You then hired more people to man scanners than usual and incentivized each of them (with money) to catch people trying to use someone else’s pass. You have hired this scanning team, claiming you want them to make people feel welcome but taught them that a null scan is more likely that of a thief than a loyal customer. Thus, you have incentivized the team members to treat all customers as guilty until proven innocent, ruining the experience for loyal customers.

When the scanning team is done making the loyal customer feel horrible, you plead with them to be patient. It's a new system, I am told. When you repeatedly delay my ability to get on the lift by making me wait for 5+ scans of my pass to use the lift multiple times a day, after a while, it feels like a form of accusation. It is as if you are accusing me of trying to jump the line multiple times a day. Why must the paying customer be extra patient for a new system from a company that made $2.8B last year?

The result is that loyal customers who have spent thousands each year with you for decades are made to feel like criminals by the people manning the scanners when your hardware/software fails repeatedly. Skiing is supposed to be fun, a chance to escape. Hard to have fun when you reach the front of the lift line, and it is a crap shoot; the person managing the scanners could be in a good mood and treat you with respect, or on a power trip and treat you like a criminal - or they are just in search of a financial incentive and will be aggressive because of it.

We are talking failure rates of the scanning equipment of 70% or more for the first few weeks and probably staying close to 45% most of the first month after launch, if my experience is any indicator. I skied roughly 25 days of the first 31 days possible at my home mountain, but your scanners only picked me up for 20 days, 10 or more of which I had to go out of my way to ensure I got scanned properly. (I am not alone here.)

I have an annual pass. I want to be scanned so you can do the math for me and keep track of my days. Some days this season, I have been lucky, and your machines worked, or the people manning scanners just let me pass because they recognized me and felt horrible scanning me 10+ times each time I lapped the mountain. But more than a few made me wait while they scanned me 10x times, reinforcing the feeling of ‘assume wrongdoing’ as the default.

I have had at least 5 days where the person with the scanner couldn’t understand my exhaustion with 10+ failed attempts to pick up my pass. It is my opinion that they should just let me go because the software problem wasn’t caused by me. I have been repeatedly accused of not having paid for my pass. My pass is on auto-renewal and has been for years. A few (not all, not even most) made me feel like I was being accused of a criminal act, with no end in sight. Because there was no easy backup, they couldn’t see the 20+ days of activity and let me go with an apology; instead, they made me feel horrible. They were convinced anyone this exhausted with the proccess must be faking it.

More than a few scan operators are thrown off by my knowledge of the system. Who would have that knowledge, well either a thief, or someone who had been dealing with the failing scanners for most days in the month of December? The incentive system and my visible frustration towards the end of the month led them to treat me like a criminal. And I don’t blame them, I used to work in retail and had to identify thieves and try to make it impossible for them to steal. But as a technologist, I also rolled out the system with more time to test. And when making a major mistake, I would eat costs to make it up to the customer.

In fact, the last day of this year, my first time up the hill for the day, the scanner didn’t work. I explained to the person manning the scanner that I didn’t want the barcode scanned because last time they did that, I had to remove my phone from my pocket every lap (despite the no cell phone signs) because the system would only allow one scan type: Bluetooth or barcode, not both in the same day. Presumably to avoid fraud. But even the barcode wouldn’t work. I was treated as a criminal because I was visibly frustrated, and the tone of my voice displayed disgust with yet another round of this accusatory behavior. I explained I had skied for more than 20+ days, but that fell on deaf ears.

On my third lap, the scan operator was pissed when I said to my friend (an engineer) when his pass wouldn’t scan either, ‘Boy, the Vail tech team f&*ked up this launch.’ I was accused of cussing out the person with the scanner. I did not! I made a statement many had made before me. And I said it to someone in the industry who, like me, would have implemented several RCA/COE (root cause analysis or correction of error) deep dives by now that the nightmare would have stopped. This rollout is an unacceptable technology rollout, plain and simple.

As a product manager, if I was attached to the team launching this scanning software, I would have handled it very differently, and that was the conversation I was trying to have with my friend on yet another day when I was treated like a criminal first and a loyal customer never. That led the scanning manager to accuse me of cussing out his employee and generally treating me like crap. We were all frustrated. I feel for the guy at the scanner and the manager, you are not paying them enough to put up with the hellish launch to a season.

(Technical note: on the day in question, the app had forced me to login before I could go to the lifts. In retrospect, my guess is that when logging in, something is added to the app that the Bluetooth picks up but due to your software upgrade on a weekend - your busiest time - a terrible time to do an upgrade to clientside devices - the scanners couldn’t pick up my phone until a few hours later when it properly downloaded in the background. Or maybe it was because I was on half-power as my phone didn’t charge properly the day before, and the scanners struggled with half-power… or the scanner was just not working right. On the day in question, I actually had to tell the scanner guy: “Let me put my phone on the strongest brightness and try scanning again” and that worked after more than 20+ scans - no exaggeration. You will notice, I had to troubleshoot it so I could get back on the mountain; they couldn’t and were too busy claiming I had cussed them out to take two seconds to realize everything I had said was the truth. They are so exhausted they couldn’t imagine a customer could be equally so. I know I am the 1% who skis this much, but don’t I deserve to be treated as innocent first and guilty second?)

None of this gets to the fact that the new system and the old system aren’t integrated so tracking that people came to trust for at least 5-8 years no longer works as expected. (See below on system integration problems). This is why I have done 1 to 3 extra laps half my days to go out of my way to ensure I get scanned before going in for the day without holding up the line.

Yes, I will say that again, I regularly do extra laps to make sure I get scanned (without holding up the line) before I leave the mountain, which makes the horrible treatment I received on December 31 more than a little ironic.

You are a multi-billion dollar company. There are a lot of things you could have implemented to solve this problem:

• Eat Costs Early Wave all problems for the first 4 weeks, or even 2 weeks. Accept there will be a few line jumpers but treat paying customers with respect and learn quickly.

• Improve Logistics of Guilty-First Policy Put someone with an iPad/computer next to the person scanning in line so when you do want to investigate someone, they can double-check that account without having to creep out of line, prove they paid and then stand in the cold waiting to rejoin their friends on the mountain who took a lap while they proved yet again they have been paying for an annual pass for most of the last decade.

• Manual Testing Methods Put someone at the crucial lifts (the ones with access to steeper terrain are where you have the highest likelihood of theft) to mark down when scans fail after say 3 tries, note the following:

  • Day

  • Time

  • Operating system of the device

  • Version of app (if possible to see quickly)

  • Verison of scanner software

  • Phone Power (was it in power save mode)

  • other patterns you observe to be relevant

  You hired more than enough people to scan; if you put some of them towards proper testing, you could have created less frustration for all involved and sorted out the bugs in the software much faster and elegantly.

• Invite Loyal Members Why not look at people with 50+ days from the year before and ask if they might be willing to help test? Give them a badge or something. Maybe handpick people who spent $1000 or more outside their pass in the past, these types would never be skirting the line; they pay for what they use and value what the mountain offers.

I am sure with a little more time, I could come up with 3 more solutions for you.

And, maybe I could come up with some metrics to help run a new financial model to see how much you are losing by treating paying customers as criminals by default.

By now, I would have normally taken 3 group or private sessions. I have taken none this year. I am so frustrated with Vail, the idea of giving you more money after being treated like a criminal isn’t desirable. I will probably join a class later in the new year, but imagine there are others out there like me. How much have you lost in your obsession to stop thieves on a mountain that is difficult to get to? I would love to put my MBA to work and help you reevaluate a financial model that advocates putting the assumption of guilt first.

In closing, I want to reiterate that the vast majority of those manning the scanners have been friendly, polite, and reasonable, but just one undoes the good of all the others. And my problem is with your incentives: You put your workers in a position where they feel they are required by their job description to treat me as if I cheated when their systems fail. It is not their fault Vail makes me feel shitty, it is your incentive and computer systems that have failed.

Thank you for listening and considering my requests.

Cheers,

A Loyal Skier & Technologist

Product Managers reading the above experience: this is an example of learning about product sense and good product decisions by reflecting on bad product experiences. Some articles I will be writing include:

• Go To Market Strategies - Where and how they went wrong

• Missed Deadlines

• Misaligned Incentives (think counter metrics)

• Managing Timelines

• Product Prioritization Failures

• Edge Case Requirements

• Cost-Benefit Analysis

• Root Cause Analysis Prompts

• Strategic Speculations

• Short-Term Hit for Long-Term Gains

• System Integration Problems

• Communication Problems

  • Corporate Messaging

  • Lack of Empathy for different use cases

    • 2-3 day visitor

    • week long vacationer

    • 30-50 day visitor

    • 50+ loyal customer

  • Not knowing someone’s history causes you to jump to conclusions and create communication nightmares.