Indy Goes Digital, Ikon Soars to 35% over Epic, Freedom Pass Shuffle

And more... Pass Notes, May 2024

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Boarding skiing’s ark, two-by-two

The leaders of Magic Mountain, Vermont; Beaver Mountain, Utah; and Bluewood, Washington have all appeared on The Storm Skiing Podcast. While these ski areas are scattered across the country, they have quite a bit in common. Independent, Indy Pass partners, busier than you’d probably think. But mostly, they’re all fighting. Not with each other, but with the enormous demands of operating a snowsportskiing center. Magic just spent five-ish years installing a used chairlift. Beaver and Bluewood have no snowmaking. Bluewood isn’t even on the electric grid.

In skiing, even the basics are hard. Especially without scale. While Vail employs a team of geniuses dedicated to stuffing your entire vacation inside your Pet Rectangle, the owner of Magic Mountain might be waving you into a parking spot. He doesn’t have the time, money, or expertise to sit around designing apps.

And yet, increasingly, consumers expect this digital element to their ski day, just like they expect a parking lot. What do you mean I need to pick up a piece of paper from a disinterested high school student through a three-inch tray of plexiglass before I can board the chairlift? What is this? 1502? The supercomputer in my pocket can teach me Arabic or transform the entire world into a comic book, but it can’t get me onto the chairlift at Magic Mountain?

That’s the point of Entabeni Systems, owner of the Indy Pass. It’s right there in their boilerplate. I’ve developed general immunity to company-articulated statements of good intent, but I’ll reprint this one here because it happens to be true: “Entabeni's singular mission is to create B2B and B2C products that keep independent ski areas competitive and viable.” What that means, in regular person talk, is that Entabeni makes all the online stuff that small ski areas could never afford to design and build themselves, so that they can compete in 2024. No one designs and builds their own chairlifts – they buy them from Doppelmayr or Leitner-Poma. Entabeni does the same thing for tech.

So, no surprise here: Indy will introduce a digital pass for the 2024-25 ski season. Like Vail’s My Epic app, it will communicate with its fellow robots using Bluetooth Low Energy technology. Don’t ask me what that means. This is why we let Entabeni handle the tech. All I know is that the digital Indy Pass will give users “self-service functions including waiver, pass photos, experience tracking, and payments.” It will also get you directly onto the chairlift(s) – including the new-used Black Chair – at Magic Mountain (and Beaver and Bluewood, and, presumably, additional, yet-to-be announced ski areas).

Indy will still mail physical passes, as the company did last season for the first time. “We are not looking at this technology to replace a physical pass on day one, but for most skiers and riders, that will be the future,” said Indy Pass Director Erik Mogensen. “Indy Pass is committed to making thoughtful and practical iterations over time. We aim to address many of the challenges in skiing with the help of technology.”

Indy Pass launched in 2019 to give small ski areas a national marketing platform that at least resembled the Epkon colossi. Hey do you know there’s an empty, 1,800-acre, 1,800-vertical-foot mountain straddling the Idaho-Montana border that averages 300 inches of snow per winter called Lost Trail? Well there is and it’s on our pass that costs less than a pancake brunch at Beaver Creek.

But Indy, having established itself as a brand and a platform, is, under the Entabeni umbrella, evolving into a kind of Noah’s Ark for small ski areas. The ship has everything 300-vertical-foot Mt. Nowhere needs to sail into the 21^st Century: marketing, advertising, technology. Yes, it’s a bargain for skiers, who get two of each on this marvelous vessel: two Jay Peaks, two Tamaracks, two Lutsens. But it’s a marvelous vessel for ski areas themselves, and not just because it brings skiers onboard. That wooden ship, it turns out, is powered by some high-tech stuff.