Recent bonfire for Ullr

Recent bonfire for Ullr

While it may seem like there is a lot of hanging around this time of year waiting for winter to really begin, it is actually quite the opposite. Living on the fringes of the Green Mountain National Forest has it's own rewards most of the year. But this time of year is a little different. The annual blizzard of falling leaves heralding the arrival of Twig season brings with it a certain "je nes sais quoi" that only arises after several multi-hour outside sessions with a rake. Oh if only the crunchy remnants of a brilliant fall could be magically transformed into a carpet of fluffy white snow...

Finishing up yard work is but one of the many tasks that take place to get the inn ready for winter. Raking leaves provides hours of work in the physical world, but the virtual world we live in also needs a lot of attention at this time of year as well.

Our friends at the Killington Resort are always busy this time of year finalizing their cooperative marketing programs. Providing hotels and inns with access to their systems to allow us to purchase ski packages directly for our guests is one of the big things they do.

Several weeks ago, as the leaves began falling, multiple PDF files totaling 80 pages of information arrived in my inbox. While ski ticket pricing at a ticket window may be straightforward, $80 dollars or $89 dollars depending upon midweek or weekend, ski package pricing is more esoteric. We all know that airlines price their seats based upon the expected volume on any particular day. Well ski package pricing follows much the same paradigm.

For several years now I have taken Killington's ski ticket pricing and programmed it into the web. I do this to allow our staff working the front desk and visitors to birchridge.com to accurately determine how much a ski vacation to Killington at the Birch Ridge Inn would actually cost. In addition to the "airline pricing paradigm", Killington also offers a myriad of other discounts, hence the 80 pages of information. Programming it all into a usable web calculator is an interesting exercise. But coming from a heritage of all night coding sessions, its good to get the cobwebs out of the brain by writing some complex software once and a while.

Birch Ridge Ski Package Calculator on birchridge.com.

Programming for the web theses days is becoming more complex in it's own right. In addition to the ski package calculator for our standard desktop web site, new this year is a ski package calculator for the mobile web. The underlying algorithms for the desktop and mobile ski package calculators are shared, but the human interface is quite different.

Birch Ridge Mobile Ski Package Calculator on birchridge.com for mobile.

The mobile ski package calculator runs on any javascript enabled smartphone. I have tested it on Iphones and Android devices. (Whenever an inn guest shows me a new smart phone at the bar, I am always asking them to go to birchridge.com to make sure the mobile site works with it.) I have yet to see a Window's Mobile device at the inn, but it should work on that platform as well.

Of course, being able to use your computer system or mobile phone to figure out pricing for your vacation in Killington is all well and good, but if you want human interaction in the loop, we will be glad to work with you directly by calling the inn (800.435.8566 or 802.422.4293). Now if we could just get all the leaves up, turn the temperature down just a bit, and get Mother Nature to bring down some white stuff....

Let it snow!