Vail Resorts has announced the addition of downhill racing to it’s on-mountain EpicMix offering.
The pattern is clear: last season EpicMix added photos to the product to allow visitors to take a photo and have it associated with their EpicMix account. This allowed the company to sell the photos to visitors where traditional photographers weren’t seeing the same levels of participation. In other words, 10 people would to ask for their photos to be taken and 9 of them would pay for it. Now 100 people ask for their photos to be taken, and 50 of them pay for it. Plus, we get the added social value of having professional photos taken on-slope, we can share them online. Which, in-turn, helps lock-in visitors to the Vail Resorts experience and promote it through online social media. We all won.
This season, by adding racing, the fairly empty downhill courses on intermediate slopes will allow visitors the ability to race their friends, Lindsay Vonn’s records, visualize the races on EpicMix, earn medals and pins, and most importantly: pay for the privilege in a frictionless way.
At 6 of our resorts, Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Heavenly and Northstar, you’ll have the opportunity to race against yourself, your friends, and even four time overall World Cup Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist Lindsey Vonn. Simply show up to one of our six race courses, and for a small fee, have your Season Pass or Epic Day lift ticket scanned. From there you’ll be ready to race.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt3aFhnraEU
The idea is this will encourage younger skiers to get into racing by making it easy and fun with EpicMix. Personally, I’m not sure there’s enough appeal for me to pay to race my friends (I’ll probably check it out once or twice, though). Learn more at EpicMix Racing at EpicMix.com.