Vail Resorts Introduces Emma, Your Epic Mountain Assistant, the World's First Digital Mountain Assistant to Provide Real-Time Information to Skiers and Snowboarders
- Emma, Your Epic Mountain Assistant, is the world's first digital mountain assistant to offer information on everything from grooming, lift line wait times and parking to recommendations on rentals, lessons and dining options.
- Guests will instantly receive expert, local information tailored to each resort and to their needs.
- Emma builds on the Company's long track record of seamlessly using technology to improve the guest experience without impacting their connection to the outdoors.
Through short message service (SMS) text, Emma answers guest questions in real time. On-demand information can be accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, resulting in instant service and a seamless experience for guests from exploring a resort's village to learning if a favorite slope is groomed to recommendations for the best après-ski location. Topics such as snow conditions and lift line wait times, parking and in-resort wayfinding, ski school, lift tickets and equipment rental options, on- and off-mountain dining and activity recommendations and more can be accessed through Emma. From planning a ski vacation to arrival and all the way through to departure, Emma offers guests an unprecedented breadth of information tailored to each resort. If Emma cannot answer a question, she will seamlessly connect guests to chat with a live agent for further assistance. As Emma interacts with guests, her knowledge base and insight will continue to expand through both human and machine learning.
Emma will be launched as an "alpha" version to a very small community of users this March to prepare for her debut in the 2018-19 winter season. Future generations of Emma may include integration with Facebook Messenger, voice assistants like Alexa, wearable technology notifications and
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A Decade of Guest Service Innovation
Emma is the latest among many of
- EpicMix, which debuted in 2010 after more than two years of development, is a ground-breaking app that allows skiers and snowboarders to track their days and vertical feet skied, earn digital pins, compete with friends and family through the leaderboards and share on-mountain accomplishments with friends through social media.
Vail Resorts followed up the original version of EpicMix with EpicMix Photo in 2011, delivering free digital photos to the EpicMix app taken on the mountain that could be shared through social media.- Next generations included the debuts of
EpicMix Racing , recording digitized amateur racing statistics andEpicMix Academy , tracking progress for guests enrolled in ski and snowboard school. - In 2014,
Vail Resorts introduced Epic Day Lift Tickets, an online and mobile platform that allows guests to purchase daily lift tickets in advance of their trip at the guaranteed lowest price and use the express line to pick up tickets or reload more days of skiing on mobile or online and skip the ticket line completely. Vail Resorts was the first company in the mountain resort industry to introduce real-time lift line wait times in the 2015-16 winter season with the EpicMix Time app by using anonymized, crowd-sourced Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals.- In 2017, the launch of EpicMix Time Insights website enabled guests to select and view actual lift line wait times for any day throughout the ski season using data collected during the previous season with the EpicMix Time app in order to plan their ski vacation.
- During its launch for the 2018-19 winter season, Emma will offer real-time, resort-specific information to guests throughout Vail,
Beaver Creek ,Breckenridge andKeystone inColorado ;Park City inUtah ; Heavenly,Northstar California andKirkwood inTahoe , and Whistler Blackcomb inCanada .
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For more information about Emma, please visit www.EmmaIsEpic.com.
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Media Relations: Rachael Woods, (303) 404-6405, rwoods1@vailresorts.com