A ski resort is a business that facilitates sports such as skiing, snowboarding and several other winter games, they are mostly located in mountainous areas where ski trails exist. Many things can be taken for granted when it comes to a resort, they will have a restaurant, more than likely multiple restaurants at different points scattered throughout, a hotel, again, its very likely there will be more than one hotel established, ski lift systems and equipment rentals.

All of these facilities are important due to the location of the resort and the needs that customer have that must be met, as in most situations, the ski resort is positioned out of town so everything that someone would require needs to be available.

Although skiing is the main sport, the resort is self-contained. In addition to trails, you will find a maze of chairlifts that skiers use to get to the top of the slope and to different trails. Moreover, there are large ski areas and beginner slopes.

A ski resort is likely to have an aerial tram and gondolas. You will further find other facilities such as ice-skating, outdoor swimming, dog-sledding, snowmobiling, horse-drawn sleds, game rooms, and entertainment joints. Moreover, they have a theater, club, cinema and cabarets.

There are other supportive facilities such as ski patrol service and first aid area. The patrol mainly marks dangerous areas, cordon-off sections and manage reckless participants. In addition, the first aid facility serves injured skiers.

All of these assets make for a enormous amount of relative task management with repairs and upkeep the primary goal of a facility manager over seeing what needs to be done on the resort, and given the spread of the assets over potentially hazardous conditions it makes for potentially the perfect storm.

Challenges Facing Ski Resorts

Ski resorts face a lot of operational issues, thinking back to all of the assets that a ski resort would have, connected and accessible management systems need to be adopted, to name just a fraction of the challenges ski resorts face are …

– Booking for groups and different events
– Disconnected hotel booking channel management
– Getting consolidated data on capacity and availability of the resort
– Lack of metrics on the utilization of the facility
– Duplicate bookings challenges
– Difficulties managing the cost of maintenance
– Inefficiencies in resort activities
– Less than optimal performance of personnel who do not have clear roles
– Lack of data on the condition of all the assets
– Excess inventory and obsolete assets
– Lack of useful reports for decision making

How to Overcome the Challenges

A ski resort can operate more efficiently with less cost implication when it automates its operations and bridges communication gaps. Efficient management of assets and personnel further gives the resort a competitive edge.

The automation requires the employment of a facility management software and an enterprise resource planning system. The ERP coupled with our customized hotel channel manager helps with guest room booking and flexible scheduling enabling the resort to be able to respond to customers’ requests on availability and pricing for different services across the entire resort.

It helps the resort compete with others for booking opportunities. Furthermore, the software assists with scheduling and allocating rooms for events.

With ERP:FM we integrate all the services to enable different members of staff and suppliers to work from the same system in booking events. They get to know which customers are booked and get access to accurate, consistent information. All the services can be set up in the ERP including reservations, catering, booking booking and room setup to help with decision making. This all helps to avoid double bookings and gives customers an efficient online platform to make reservations. The ERP makes it easy to calculate the billing properties, know the utilization, manage costs and optimize employee productivity.

Similarly, the ski resort needs a facility management solution to increase efficiency in the management and use of assets. By making use of asset management in line with an easy to use interface such as our geography tree system it in turn helps the resort to only maintain required assets and maximize their efficiency.

Management of real estate properties and their localisation is one of the biggest challenges facing a ski resort manager, dealing and recording every little event is of key importance to make sure quality is maintained. Furthermore, the resort needs access to all the asset data in order to track operation and customer experience. These systems present useful data in a manner that is easy to understand. They boost customer service and maximise revenue.

With ERPFM our systems integrate all operations of ski management to handle ticketing, group sales, contact management, rentals and invoicing, leaving the resort able to manage inventory, optimize guest data, track gift certificates and manage changes in the ski rates.