One of those things I miss from the pre-digital era is the concert ticket stub. There was something about getting the pristine ticket in the mail or at the box office and anticipating the fun that will be had each time you walked past the tickets stuck to you fridge with a magnet. Then after the concert, you'd pull the ticket from your pocket, creased and bent and add it to the collection of stubs.
Sadly, with online ticket purchases you no longer get the ticket printed on card stock. Printing the ticket stub on your printer just isn't the same. It's a lost art form.
Now it seems the ski lift ticket is going the same way as the concert ticket. Instead of a tine over which you fold your ticket, ski resorts are now issuing RFID cards. The cards are used to pass through an electronic gate after getting scanned.
It's a technology in search of a problem.
After the cost of buying a pair of skis (or even renting them), there can't be a lot of people who are trying to sneak onto a mountain without a lift ticket. The lift operators doing spot checks to see if skiers had today's lift ticket worked fine.
From a user experience, this technology "solution" is nothing but a hassle. If you have a phone in the same pocket as the card, it won't read. The card isn't attached to anything, because it should go in a pocket, so there's a higher likely hood of losing it (or dropping it off the lift, like I did). Sometimes the card won't work, leading to a trip back to the lift ticket office to get the card reset.
Perhaps this helps the ski hill keep track of the number of people in a COVID world. It might even help them understand where skiers are on the hill. But the inconvenience to the skier isn't worth the trouble. I had a little moment of anxiety every time I had to pass through a gate.
Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker wrote a thread on Twitter based on Princeton's decision to drop Blackboard. Blackboard is a Learning Management System that is reviled by both educators and students alike. His argument is that enterprise software isn't sold to the people who need to use it, but to committees who base their decision-making on checklists of features. Blackboard has more features than its competitors, but simple tasks can take multiple steps that only frustrate users. Because a committee chose to invest in it without necessarily using it, they relied on the feature list.
RFID access to lifts is the same kind of solution. It looks great on paper, but is a hassle to skiers. It's a technology in search of a problem, but lift tickets aren't.