How Revelstoke Mountain Resort improves customer experience and wait times with WaitWell
Revelstoke Mountain Resort improves the customer experience and wait times with a virtual queue
WaitWell has helped Revelstoke Mountain resort manage service delivery at multiple locations at their resort. Customers wait in a virtual queue or make an appointment instead of waiting in lineups in the summer heat. Staff and managers especially love the two -way communication and the data reporting feature because it has helped them improve the overall customer experience.
Overview
During the winter months, Revelstoke Mountain Resort (RMR) in beautiful British Columbia is known for its downhill skiing and snowy mountain views. During the summer months, the same resort opens up its famous pipe mountain coaster, paragliding, aerial park and disc golf course for thousands of tourists and visitors every day. With such a large volume of customers and people wanting to try more than one activity, Revelstoke needed a way to manage service delivery at multiple locations at their resort.
With the help of WaitWell, they are able to manage appointments and walk-ins at different attractions and decrease customer wait times. This has allowed RMR to serve more customers in a shorter amount of time since implementation. Customers can now enjoy multiple attractions instead of wasting their time waiting in line.
Business Challenge
Tens of thousands of customers line up every summer to ride the mountain coaster or swing their way through the aerial adventure park at RMR. Customers used to wait in line for over three to four hours in the blaring heat, standing in one place and not enjoying the rest of the resort. Dustin Fransoo, the Lift Operations Manager, saw this as an opportunity to find a solution to improve the customer experience, as well as help their staff manage high volumes of customers at any given time.
“We had far too many people trying to get down our coaster and it really was a major problem.” – Dustin Fransoo, Lift Operations Manager at Revelstoke Mountain Resort
Solution
Revelstoke reached out to WaitWell in the Spring of 2021 to manage service delivery. Their first attraction that implemented WaitWell was the aerial park. Here, customers book an appointment for a certain time slot instead of waiting in line since this activity takes longer than others to complete. They invite the group to prepare ahead with safety training and harness fitting so guests are ready to go as soon as their time slot begins.
Staff and customers thought this attraction’s service delivery transition was a huge success, so they decided to implement WaitWell at the Pipe Coaster.
The mountain coaster attraction uses WaitWell in a completely different method than the aerial park. They have customers wait in a virtual line and receive communication through SMS or in-app messaging when it is their turn to ride the mover to the lift and onto the coaster.
Fransoo and his staff love the communication aspect of WaitWell. They are able to tell customers when it’s their turn to ride, send out a mass communication to everyone waiting in line if the weather turns or if they have to close the attractions and even answer questions they receive from customers throughout the day.
“The main thing for us that distinguishes WaitWell from another run-of-the-mill queueing system is really the communication line that we have with our guests. We are able to actually communicate with people, it is so much more than a queue management system for us.” – Dustin Fransoo, Lift Operations Manager, Revelstoke Mountain Resort
Results
Implementing WaitWell has tremendously improved the customer experience at RMR. For example, customers can book an appointment at the aerial park before they arrive, get in the virtual line at the mountain coaster, and in the meantime, they can have lunch or play some disk golf. Being able to enjoy all the attractions without wasting time standing in line has been a huge asset.
William Dyack, an RMR visitor said, “I loved using WaitWell because I got to enjoy other aspects of the resort instead of being stuck waiting in line.”
On the back end of service, the data collection has helped Revelstoke gain important business insights.
“With WaitWell’s data, we can actually get an accurate time estimate for how long customers are waiting and compare that to what we originally quoted them. This lets us see how accurate we are.”- Dustin Fransoo, Lift Operations Manager, Revelstoke Mountain Resort
Revelstoke is now able to use data to see how long their customers are actually waiting which helps them give more accurate wait-time estimates in the long run. Along with this, they are better able to predict how many customers they will serve in an hour, helping them make better staffing decisions.
“Retrieving data about average party size has been a great asset for us as we can more accurately predict how many customers we have per hour.” – Dustin Fransoo, Lift Operations Manager, Revelstoke Mountain Resort
Fransoo describes the team as supportive and responsive. He knows that WaitWell has his back.
“WaitWell’s support has saved us through long weekends and even holidays. The team has been super responsive and really fast.” – Dustin Fransoo, Lift Operations Manager, Revelstoke Mountain Resort
The real benefits of WaitWell that we have seen as a company as a whole are the communication lines and the data collection.”
– DUSTIN FRANSOO, LIFT OPERATIONS MANAGER, REVELSTOKE MOUNTAIN RESORT