Belgiangirl
Ski Diva Extraordinaire
Are you asking for places like Waterville Valley using a system without gates? Or places like Alta that have gates, but also have people looking at the photos that are stored for season passes? In either case, I'm guessing the fact that U.S. lifts are loaded based on people queuing in a "maze" of lift lines with employees managing the line may be a factor. By the time someone is about to reach the loading area, the line layout only allows a few people to enter the final section. I haven't skied in Europe but have read about the free-for-all pushing that can happen. Americans complain about waiting in lines, but they are used to the concept. I've traveled in other countries where that's not the case.
The gateless system to be specific. I guess the maze-like setup of the lift lines helps, most lifts here are just a semi-straight line to the loading area. You pass the RFID gate and then it's straight on to the individual loading gates, or whatever they're called. I get how people scanning tickets or a gate setup allows a resort to quickly filter out anyone without a pass or with an invalid pass.
With the gateless system I can see how employees would pick out those skiing with someone else's pass, a children's pass,.... but what if I just show up without any kind of RFID card and go to the loading area? Those systems are made to detect RFID cards, not any random moving object coming through if I'm not mistaken? Would humans have to check this? Once there's more than say, ten people waiting in line at a certain lift that's bound to become a mission impossible. At that point you're not just asking them to ID-check against ski pass pics, which is hard enough as it is, but you're also asking them to simultaneously scan queues for faces that don't show up in whatever software they're using to check against resort data??
Intelligent cameras with facial recognition could make this a relatively straightforward task, but that kind of technology is still really expensive so I just can't see that happening anytime soon. Really curious about how they've gone about this!
I've used Axess and Skidata RFID gates in various resorts! Both work just fine. Something I was surprised to learn from the links you shared, is that a lot of resorts only check passes at the bottom lifts (is that correct?). In contrast, almost every single lift here has RFID gates. The few lifts without gates are usually glacier surface lifts or smaller, older lifts that force you to take another lift (with gates) to head back to the base of a mountain.