Blood Moon - Lunar Eclispe seen from Birch Ridge Inn last night

Blood Moon - Lunar Eclispe seen from Birch Ridge Inn last night

If the changing colors, colder temperatures, and last nights Blood Moon are not enough evidence for you that change is in the air, then todays announcement by the Killington Resort of ski ticket prices for the 2015-2016 ski season should be a reality check. Summer has come to an end. Fall is all around us. Winter is just a short time away.

The Killington Resort announced today, via an article in the local Rutland Herald, that they will be opting for a single price lift ticket at the ticket window this winter. People who walk up to the ticket window and purchase a day ticket will pay the same price mid-week as on weekends...$94 per day. ($96 during holidays).

While this might seem like a large number, it is important to understand that less than 10% of lift tickets are purchased at the ticket window.

Most lift tickets today are purchased online associated with lodging packages or advanced reservations. Killington in fact sells lift tickets online for people who plan their trips at a significant discount versus window pricing. This year, Killington has adopted an "Airline" pricing model to their advance ticket sales. The price of a lift ticket online for a future day will vary based upon a number of factors. As a result, Killington could actually change their online lift ticket price for future dates EVERY DAY! Bottom line... if you are planning ahead, when you see what looks like a deal....Grab It! because it might not be there tomorrow.

As an innkeeper, this has made life interesting. But coming out of an engineering background, I viewed this change on Killington's part as a challenge.

On our website, birchridge.com, and on it's mobile companion m.birchridge.com, the inn has always allowed guests to determine the total cost of a ski/ride package, including lodging, lift tickets, rental equipment, lessons, etc. In the past, the software would examine static tables with lift ticket price information to compute the overall package cost. Easy Peasy.... like adding 2 or more numbers together.

The changes made by Killington have added several additional layer of complexity to the problem. As prices for lift tickets can change every day, our website needs to be adaptive. Each day we go out and collect pricing information from Killington. While that sounds pretty easy, the total data collected from the resort each day comes in at about 500MBytes... yes you read that right... 1/2 Gigabytes of information related to current lift ticket pricing is collected each day. And this is just for Killington. An equivilent amount of information will be generated for Pico when lift ticket pricing is published for that subset of the resort.

While creating a table with this information is a trivial task, downloading 500MBytes of data down to a clients PC or Cell Phone each time they wanted to compute a lodging package is not nice. Most cell phone plans have data caps of 2 to 10Gbytes... We want our guests to be able to pay for a visit to Killington, not have a larger cell phone bill. As a result, taking advantage of some Web 2.0 technology(Ajax, Json), I developed a series of processes which collect the lift package pricing from the birchridge.com server only for the days that the guest plugs into the Ski/Ride package calculator. This keeps the communications load between the guests device and the server light, eliminating large data charges. While it does introduce a small amount of latency to the process as the clients device communicates with the server, the overall process due making the data transfers light weight is roughly the same as it was using our older methods.

So what does this mean for the potenital guest to the Birch Ridge Inn....

Very simple.... when ever a guest calculates a lift ticket package with a stay at the Birch Ridge Inn, our web site is quoting the best price we can give based upon the current pricing for lift ticket products from the Killington Resort. (Please note... restrictions in our agreement with Killington do not allow us to break out lift ticket prices separately from our lodging packages. Hence we can only show a combined price with lodging and lift ticket products.. But you can look at our lodging only pricing and figure it out.)

If you would like to get a quote for a Ski/Ride and Stay package from the Birch Ridge Inn at Killington, go to our Ski Package Calculator on birchridge.com.

Fall folage colors are continuing to progress nicely around Killington. We hope to see you at the Birch Ridge Inn during your fall visit.

In the mean time....Wherever you may be... hit them straight... keep it in the fairway... and don't forget your sunscreen.