{"id":6757,"date":"2012-03-09T11:25:16","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T16:25:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/?p=6757"},"modified":"2012-03-09T12:44:45","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T17:44:45","slug":"how-apps-are-keeping-ski-areas-honest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/2012\/03\/09\/how-apps-are-keeping-ski-areas-honest\/","title":{"rendered":"How Apps Are Keeping Ski Areas Honest"},"content":{"rendered":"
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YoTuT \/ Flickr<\/p>

Researchers say apps are keeping ski areas honest about snowfall<\/p><\/div>\n

Spring weather is now starting to roll in, but just last week winter had its last hurrah.\u00a0And when those big snow storms wallop the mountains, ski areas see dollar signs.<\/p>\n

A pair of Dartmouth<\/a> economists are researching <\/a>the tendency of ski areas to exaggerate snowfall reports, especially on weekends, in hopes of luring more skiers to the slopes.\u00a0But they found that interactive websites and smartphone apps are turning those ski areas into honest brokers.<\/p>\n

Relying on the ski area for information about trail conditions is a bit like relying on the owner of a theater to review movies that he\u2019s playing.\u00a0In both instances there\u2019s a pretty good incentive to make them sound a lot better than they are.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless that\u2019s the information skiers have been relying on for a long time.<\/p>\n

Greg Keeler, the head of marketing at Cannon Mountain<\/a>, says Cannon is very honest in reporting snowfall totals. “We make a point of just trying to call it the way it lands, so that\u2019s just kinda the way we do it here,” Keeler says.<\/p>\n

He says that the ski areas that he has worked at have always played it straight. He \u00a0says there is a definite procedure for how snowfall is measured.<\/p>\n\n

“Snow reporters go out and measure the snow. We have certain spots around the base where we check to get few different measurements and readings,” he says, “and then we check in with groomers and ski patrollers in the morning to see if there\u2019s any major difference between the summit and the base.”<\/p>\n

But despite Keeler’s assurances, many people have a hard time trusting the ski areas\u2019 self-reviewing.<\/p>\n

Take Jon Zinman<\/a> for example.\u00a0 He’s an economist at Dartmouth College. Zinman and his coauthor, Eric Zitzwitz,\u00a0<\/a>have been thinking about the profit motive ski areas\u2019 have to exaggerate for a long time. They\u00a0<\/a>hatched the idea for a research paper while sitting on a chair-lift one day.<\/p>\n

Zinman\u00a0says, “There\u2019s lots of, I guess you could call it ‘anec-data’ out there: everybody has a story pro or con.”\u00a0But he and his colleague\u00a0set about hunting down raw data to prove that ski areas inflate their snowfall numbers.<\/p>\n

They discovered that \u2013 surprise, surprise \u2013 the marketers were exaggerating.<\/p>\n

“Ski resorts tend to report more snow on weekends than on weekdays,” Zinman says, “some ski resorts tend to exaggerate more on weekends than others, namely those that have expert terrain and don\u2019t offer money back guarantees.”<\/p>\n

But just as they made these findings, the world of snow reporting was changing.<\/p>\n

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neodelphi \/ Flickr<\/p>

Apps are helping to keep resorts honest<\/p><\/div>\n

“An iPhone app <\/a>launched that made it much easier for skiers to report on resort reports in real-time, using their phones say from the lift or from the lodge,” Zinman\u00a0recounts.\u00a0Almost immediately the instance of weekend exaggeration fell off a cliff.<\/p>\n

So Zinman says that, now-a-days, Greg Keeler from Cannon Mountain probably is reporting snowfall as accurately as he can.<\/p>\n

Not that Keeler\u00a0is really nervous that ski areas have lost their monopoly on reporting skiing conditions.\u00a0He thinks it\u2019s great that skiers are reporting in from the chair-lifts, though he says Cannon mostly sees this effect on Facebook.<\/p>\n

“We just say, here\u2019s the story, it snowed six inches today, it was awesome, here\u2019s a picture. And then everybody kinda lines up and says, ‘Yeah it was,’ or you know once in a while somebody will say, ‘Yeah it was good but maybe over here it wasn\u2019t that great,’ and it\u2019s all good and we let the conversation happen,” Keeler says.<\/p>\n

Zinman thinks that resorts probably gave up inflating their numbers so quickly because, quite simply, it wasn\u2019t getting more skiers to turn out.<\/p>\n

“Even before the iPhone App, skiers were pretty savvy about this exaggeration, and had pierced the veil to a great extent.”<\/p>\n

In other words, everyone already knew that you can\u2019t trust the theater to review the movies, you\u2019ve either got to see them for yourself, or ask a friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spring weather is now starting to roll in, but just last week winter had its last hurrah.\u00a0And when those big snow storms wallop the mountains, ski areas see dollar signs. A pair of Dartmouth economists are researching the tendency of ski areas to exaggerate snowfall reports, especially on weekends, in hopes of luring more skiers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":6762,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[506,364,499,510],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6757"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6757"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6777,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6757\/revisions\/6777"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/new-hampshire\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}