Get Ski Bots · Reference

The Mountain Travel Industry Glossary

The working vocabulary of the mountain-travel business — sales, marketing, technology, distribution, guest service and operations — defined plainly. The language our AI is fluent in.

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z

ADR (Average Daily Rate) Sales & Revenue: The average revenue earned per occupied room per night. A core lodging metric for pricing and performance.
After-hours coverage Guest Service & CX: Handling guest questions outside staffed hours, when a large share of planning and booking questions actually arrive.
Agent handoff Guest Service & CX: Passing a conversation from the AI to a human for high-touch or high-value needs, carrying the context along.
AHT (Average Handle Time) Guest Service & CX: The average duration of a service interaction. AI reduces it by resolving routine contacts instantly.
Allocation Distribution & Tour Operators: A block of inventory (rooms, tickets) a supplier sets aside for a specific partner or channel to sell.
Ancillary revenue Sales & Revenue: Revenue beyond the core product — rentals, lessons, F&B, parking, add-ons. Often the highest-margin dollars a resort earns and a prime target for AI-driven upsell.
AOV (Average Order Value) Sales & Revenue: The average amount a guest spends per transaction. Rises when the booking flow cross-sells the right add-ons.
API Technology & Systems: Application Programming Interface — the contract that lets two systems exchange data, the backbone of every integration.
ARPU Sales & Revenue: Average Revenue Per User — total revenue divided by active guests or accounts, used to gauge monetization.
ARR / MRR Sales & Revenue: Annual and Monthly Recurring Revenue — the predictable subscription revenue a business books, the headline metric for SaaS and recurring services.
Attach rate Sales & Revenue: The share of a primary purchase (a lift ticket) that also buys a related item (rentals, a lesson). A direct measure of cross-sell effectiveness.
Attribution Marketing & CRM: Assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touches that influenced it, so you know which channels actually drive revenue.
Avalanche control systems Suppliers & Vendors: Suppliers of remote and in-place snow-safety systems that trigger controlled slides to keep terrain safe, from gas-fired exploders to tower systems (Gazex, O'Bellx, Wyssen).

BAR (Best Available Rate) Distribution & Tour Operators: The lowest unrestricted rate a supplier publicly offers on a given date — the reference point for rate parity.
Base depth Operations & Equipment: The measured depth of the snowpack on the mountain — a headline conditions figure guests ask about constantly.
Booking engine Technology & Systems: The software that powers online reservations and checkout for tickets, passes or lodging on a resort's own site.
Booking window Distribution & Tour Operators: The lead time between when a guest books and when they travel — a key input to pricing and demand forecasting.

CDP (Customer Data Platform) Marketing & CRM: A system that unifies guest data from every source into a single profile marketing can act on.
Channel manager Technology & Systems: A system that syncs inventory and rates across every distribution channel (OTAs, GDS, direct) so you never oversell.
Chatbot Technology & Systems: Software that holds a text conversation with a guest; modern ones are AI-driven and answer in natural language.
Churn Marketing & CRM: The rate at which customers or pass-holders stop buying or lapse. The inverse of retention.
Commission model Distribution & Tour Operators: A distribution arrangement where the intermediary is paid a percentage of the sale after the guest pays the supplier.
Containment rate Guest Service & CX: The share of conversations fully handled by automation without escalating to a human.
Conversational AI Technology & Systems: AI that understands natural language and responds coherently across turns — the foundation for chat, voice and text agents.
Conversion rate Sales & Revenue: The percentage of visitors or inquiries that complete a desired action — a booking, a purchase, a lead. The central lever of digital revenue.
CRM Marketing & CRM: Customer Relationship Management — the system of record for guest and account relationships, interactions and history.
Cross-sell Sales & Revenue: Offering a complementary product alongside the main purchase — rentals with a ticket, a lesson with a pass.
CRS (Central Reservation System) Technology & Systems: The system that manages lodging inventory, rates and reservations across a property or resort group.
CSAT Guest Service & CX: Customer Satisfaction score — a direct measure of how happy guests are with an interaction.
CTR (Click-Through Rate) Marketing & CRM: The share of people who click a link, ad or email out of those who saw it — a first-line engagement signal.

Deflection rate Guest Service & CX: The percentage of incoming contacts resolved without a live agent, through self-service or AI.
DMC (Destination Management Company) Distribution & Tour Operators: A local operator that provides ground services, logistics and expertise on behalf of tour operators and travel buyers.
Drip / lifecycle campaign Marketing & CRM: An automated sequence of messages triggered by a guest's stage or behavior — pre-arrival, post-visit, win-back.
Dynamic packaging Distribution & Tour Operators: Bundling components — lodging, tickets, transport — assembled in real time at booking, versus a fixed pre-built package.
Dynamic pricing Sales & Revenue: Prices that shift by date, demand and advance purchase to maximize revenue and spread demand. Standard for lift tickets, passes and lodging.

E-commerce & booking platforms Suppliers & Vendors: Vendors that power online sales of tickets, passes and lodging on a resort's own site, often with dynamic pricing and packaging (Aspenware, Inntopia).

FCR (First Contact Resolution) Guest Service & CX: Resolving a guest's issue on the first interaction, with no callbacks — a core quality and efficiency metric.
Fencing, netting & signage Suppliers & Vendors: Suppliers of boundary rope, safety netting, padding and wayfinding signage that keep guests oriented and protected on the mountain.
First-party data Marketing & CRM: Data you collect directly from your own guests. Increasingly the most valuable and durable marketing asset as third-party cookies fade.
FIT (Free Independent Traveler) Distribution & Tour Operators: An individual or small-party traveler booking on their own, as opposed to a group tour.
Funnel Sales & Revenue: The stages a guest moves through from awareness to purchase. Each stage leaks prospects; the job is to widen the top and reduce the leaks.

GDS (Global Distribution System) Distribution & Tour Operators: The networks (Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport) that connect travel agents and OTAs to supplier inventory worldwide.
GIT (Group Inclusive Tour) Distribution & Tour Operators: A pre-arranged group package sold as one product, typically at negotiated group rates.
Grooming Operations & Equipment: Machine-smoothing of trails overnight with snowcats to produce consistent, skiable surfaces ("corduroy").
Grooming & snowcat manufacturers Suppliers & Vendors: Makers of the tracked vehicles that till and smooth trails overnight into consistent corduroy (Prinoth, Kässbohrer PistenBully).
Grounding Technology & Systems: Constraining an AI's answers to verified source content instead of guessing — the main defense against hallucination.
Guest technology & AI Suppliers & Vendors: Vendors of websites, CRM, analytics and AI guest-service tools — including Get Ski Bots — that handle inquiries across chat, voice and text and turn conversations into revenue and insight.

Hallucination Technology & Systems: When an AI gives a confident answer not backed by real data; minimized by grounding on verified resort knowledge.

Insurance & risk management Suppliers & Vendors: Providers of liability coverage, risk programs and safety consulting tailored to the unique exposures of operating a ski area (MountainGuard, Safehold Special Risk).
Integration Technology & Systems: A live connection between two systems (say, an AI agent and a booking engine) that lets them share data and actions.
IVR Technology & Systems: Interactive Voice Response — the automated phone-menu system that conversational voice AI replaces with natural speech.

Knowledge base Technology & Systems: The body of source content an AI answers from — pages, policies, files, text edits. Its quality caps answer accuracy.

Lift & ropeway manufacturers Suppliers & Vendors: Companies that design, build and service chairlifts, gondolas and surface lifts — the core capital infrastructure of any resort (Doppelmayr, Leitner-Poma).
Lift capacity Operations & Equipment: The number of guests a lift can move per hour — a driver of wait times and mountain flow.
LLM (Large Language Model) Technology & Systems: The AI model behind conversational agents, trained to understand and generate natural language and grounded on your content.
LTV / CLV Sales & Revenue: Lifetime (Customer) Value — the total revenue a guest generates over their relationship with you. Justifies acquisition and retention spend.

Master planning & consulting Suppliers & Vendors: Firms that plan mountain development, terrain, base areas and capital projects, and advise on operations and strategy (SE Group, Ecosign).
Merchant vs agency model Distribution & Tour Operators: In the merchant model the intermediary collects payment and pays the supplier a net rate; in the agency model the supplier collects and pays a commission.
Middleware Technology & Systems: Software that sits between systems to translate and route data, letting tools that weren't built to talk to each other integrate.

Net rate Distribution & Tour Operators: The wholesale price a supplier gives a distributor, who then marks it up to the guest. The margin is the distributor's.
NPS (Net Promoter Score) Guest Service & CX: A loyalty metric based on how likely guests are to recommend you, from detractors to promoters.

Omni-channel Technology & Systems: One consistent experience across chat, voice, text and social, powered by a single knowledge base.
OTA (Online Travel Agency) Distribution & Tour Operators: Third-party booking sites (Expedia, Booking.com) that resell lodging and travel — a major channel, and a reason to strengthen direct booking.

Pace Sales & Revenue: Booking pace — how bookings for a future date are accumulating versus the same point last year. Drives pricing and inventory decisions.
Personalization Marketing & CRM: Tailoring content, offers and answers to the individual guest based on their data and intent.
Pipeline Sales & Revenue: The set of open deals or bookings in progress, weighted by stage and probability, used to forecast revenue.
PMS (Property Management System) Technology & Systems: The operational system a lodging property uses for rooms, rates, check-in and guest records.
POS (Point of Sale) Technology & Systems: The system that processes transactions at the window, lodge or shop and records what was sold.

Rack rate Distribution & Tour Operators: The full published, non-discounted price of a room or product — the ceiling from which discounts and net rates are derived.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) Technology & Systems: A technique that retrieves relevant source docs and feeds them to the AI at answer time, keeping responses grounded and current.
Rate parity Distribution & Tour Operators: Keeping a product's price consistent across all channels so no channel undercuts your direct rate.
Receptive operator Distribution & Tour Operators: An inbound tour operator in the destination that packages and sells local services to overseas tour operators and agents.
Rental & tuning equipment Suppliers & Vendors: Suppliers of rental-shop management systems and ski and board tuning and waxing machines that run the equipment side of guest service (Wintersteiger, Montana).
Rentals Operations & Equipment: The equipment-rental operation — skis, boards, boots — a major ancillary-revenue and guest-service touchpoint.
Retargeting Marketing & CRM: Serving ads to people who already visited your site or engaged, to bring them back to complete a booking.
RevPAR Sales & Revenue: Revenue Per Available Room — occupancy times ADR. The single most-watched lodging performance metric.
RFID access control Suppliers & Vendors: Providers of the gated, contactless lift-access systems and media that read a guest's ticket or pass hands-free (SkiData, Axess).
RFID lift access Operations & Equipment: Contactless media with an embedded chip that opens lift gates hands-free, replacing scanned paper tickets.
RMS (Revenue Management System) Technology & Systems: Software that recommends prices and inventory controls based on demand forecasts to maximize revenue.

Segmentation Marketing & CRM: Dividing your audience into groups (day-trippers, pass-holders, families) so messaging and offers fit each one.
Self-service Guest Service & CX: Letting guests resolve their own needs without waiting for staff; AI extends it to voice and text, not just the website.
SEO / SEM Marketing & CRM: Search Engine Optimization (earning organic rankings) and Search Engine Marketing (paid search) — the two ways to capture demand at the moment of search.
SLA (Service-Level Agreement) Guest Service & CX: A defined commitment for responsiveness, such as answering within a set time — easier to hit with instant, 24/7 AI.
Snow report Operations & Equipment: The daily published summary of conditions — new snow, base, open lifts and trails — a top reason guests contact a resort.
Snowmaking Operations & Equipment: Producing machine-made snow to open earlier, extend the season and cover high-traffic terrain when nature falls short.
Snowmaking systems Suppliers & Vendors: Manufacturers of the guns, fans, pumps and automation that produce machine-made snow to open earlier and extend the season (HKD Snowmakers, SMI, TechnoAlpin, Demaclenko).
SSO (Single Sign-On) Technology & Systems: Letting users access multiple systems with one set of credentials — smoother and more secure than many logins.

Terrain park Operations & Equipment: A dedicated area with jumps, rails and features for freestyle skiing and snowboarding.
Terrain park & tubing systems Suppliers & Vendors: Suppliers of park features and ramps, plus snow-tubing lanes and uphill conveyors ("magic carpets") that build out freestyle and family terrain.
Ticketing Operations & Equipment: The systems and operations that sell and validate lift tickets and passes, online and at the window.
Ticketing, access & POS platforms Suppliers & Vendors: Systems that sell and validate tickets and passes, run point of sale, and manage guest access across the resort (accesso RTP|One, Siriusware, SkiData, Axess).
Tour operator Distribution & Tour Operators: A business that assembles and sells travel packages — combining lodging, activities, lift access and transport — to consumers or through agents.
Travel agent Distribution & Tour Operators: An intermediary who advises and books travel on a guest's behalf, earning commission or fees.

Uniforms & apparel Suppliers & Vendors: Providers of staff, patrol and instructor uniforms and branded outerwear built for cold-weather, high-visibility work.
Upsell Sales & Revenue: Moving a guest to a higher-value option — a premium pass, a better room, a package instead of a single ticket.
Uptime Operations & Equipment: The share of scheduled time a lift, system or service is operational — a reliability measure guests feel directly.
Utility vehicles & fleet Suppliers & Vendors: Suppliers of snowmobiles, side-by-sides and utility vehicles used for patrol, operations and mountain access.
UTM Marketing & CRM: Tracking tags appended to a URL so analytics can attribute traffic and conversions to a specific campaign or source.

Voice AI Technology & Systems: AI that answers and holds real phone conversations, understanding speech and handing high-touch calls to staff, 24/7.

Waste & sustainability services Suppliers & Vendors: Providers of recycling, waste and energy-efficiency programs that help resorts operate responsibly and meet climate commitments.
Water & energy infrastructure Suppliers & Vendors: Vendors of the pumping, piping, power and sustainability systems that supply snowmaking and resort operations at scale.
Webhook Technology & Systems: An automated message one system sends another when an event happens (a booking, a payment) — event-driven integration.
Wholesaler Distribution & Tour Operators: A distributor that buys inventory at net rates in volume and resells to agents and operators, rarely to the public directly.
Widget Technology & Systems: An embeddable interface — most commonly the on-site chat pop-up or inline panel that puts the AI agent on any page.

Yield management Sales & Revenue: The discipline of adjusting price and availability to demand to maximize total revenue; the strategy dynamic pricing executes.

Zero-party data Marketing & CRM: Information a guest intentionally and proactively shares — preferences, intent — the gold standard for consented personalization.

Fluent in every one of these terms

Get Ski Bots answers your guests in the language of the mountain — across chat, voice, text and social, trained on your resort.

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