CCXP25: Ingressos e Novidades Exclusivas para a Maior Festival de Cultura Pop do Mundo! #bancodobrasilourocardvisa #camaroteomelete #ccxphero #ccxp25 #culturapop #epicpass #ingressos #sãopauloexpo #thunderpass https://alternativanerd.com.br/series-tv/ccxp25-ingressos-e-novidades-exclusivas-para-a-maior-festival-de-cultura-pop-do-mundo

"#Epic Pass price increases; now on sale for 2025-26 #ski season"

Wow! No new value, underpaid staff, overcrowded slopes, but higher prices?

Not for me. I will NOT buy #VailResorts #EpicPass next year. Not sure #Alterra #Ikon will be better; can't be much worse. 🤞🤷‍♂️

https://www.denverpost.com/2025/03/04/epic-pass-price-increase-benefits-vail-resorts-on-sale-2025-2026/

https://www.wacoca.com/tour/396008/ More than just skiing and snowboarding! The charm of Rusutsu Resort Hotel! [Subtitled] #epicpass #hokkaido #hotspring #JapanSkiTrip #japow #rusutsu #rusutsuresort #Todd'sJapanSkiTrip #インバウンド #ウエスティンホテル #おすすめ #ゲレ食 #スキーリゾート #スキー場 #トッドのスノートリップ #ナイタースキー #ニセコツアー #パウダースノー #ランチ #ルスツリゾート #加森 #加森ビル #北海道 #北海道ツアー #北海道地方 #北海道地方ツアー #日本一高いリフト券 #温泉 #滑雪勝地 #滑雪場 #無料バス #留壽都 #留寿都 #遊園地

Hey skiers and snowboarders.
Did you know that #VailResorts is refusing to good faith negotiate with its #union in Park City UT?
Yeah the ski patrollers have been on strike over Christmas because they won't give raises to match inflation.

If you think this is a problem, your can do something even if you don't ski in Utah! Vail Resorts owns the Epic pass. Consider letting them know you're looking into switching passes because of this

#UnionStrong #EpicPass #skiing #ski
https://coloradosun.com/2025/01/03/utah-ski-patroller-strike/

Three weekends ago, my phone did something weird when I tried using it to pay for a few farmers-market purchases: nothing. The Google Wallet app functioned like usual when I opened it and picked the credit card I use for everyday spending, but then tapping the phone to the NFC reader on a merchant’s credit-card terminal yielded no response.

Since all my cards have NFC built-in and since I had my wallet on me, I didn’t waste time trying to debug the problem and just fished out the physical card to complete the purchase. And then I spent a couple of weeks ignoring the problem while it failed to go away on its own.

Venting about this issue on a chat thread with other tech journalists surfaced a troubleshooting suggestion I should have thought to test on my own: see if other apps using the phone’s NFC radio work. I first remembered that I have one weird transit app that solely exists to top up Dublin’s stored-value Leap card, then was relieved to see the app detect the card I’d collected two summers ago when I tapped it to the back of the phone.

Likewise, Metro’s SmarTrip app responded to a tap of my own card. And then on Friday, the Epic Pass app on my phone (yes, I finally got that activated) functioned properly as a wireless, inside-a-ski-jacket lift ticket. So the NFC radio on this phone was clearly fine.

What else could it be? Google’s r/GooglePixel forum surfaced posts reporting similar problems, and one not only reassured me that I wasn’t uniquely snakebit but pointed to a specific remedy that I’ve since seen suggested elsewhere: deleting the cache of the system-level NFC Service app.

Following that required a deeper dive than usual into Android’s Settings app: Tap Apps, tap the “See all” link below the list of recently-opened apps, tap the vertical-ellipsis button at the top right and select “Show system,” then scroll down to select “Nfc Service” (yes, that abbreviation for “Near Field Communication” should be capitalized), then tap “Storage & cache,” then tap “Clear cache.”

“Trash cache” is an old tech-support trick that seems like it shouldn’t work anymore–shouldn’t apps be sufficiently self-aware to know when they’re ingesting corrupted temporary data?–and yet it seems to have worked in this case. Will the fix stick? I sure hope so, at least until the next time Google indulges in yet another mobile-payment-apps reorg.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/02/23/this-months-smartphone-snafu-wayward-google-wallet-behavior/

#EpicPass #GooglePay #GoogleWallet #GPay #LeapTopUp #mobilePayments #NFC #Reddit #SmarTrip #tapToPay

An attempt to trim the cost of a couple of days of local skiing by paying in advance wound up inflicting me with time and annoyance charges, and now I’ve learned some things about how a company can trip over itself at customer support–online, over the phone and in its app.

This all started after last winter, when an overdue resumption of downhill skiing led me to buy new skis and boots, what I thought of as a non-trivial vote of confidence in my 50-something self. Then I decided to start the 2023-2024 season early by purchasing a two-day Epic Pass from Vail Resorts covering that company’s mid-Atlantic and northeastern ski areas.

(The ski industry’s pivot from selling mountain-specific lift tickets to marketing multiple-resort season passes is something I’d missed over a shameful four years of letting my old downhill skis collect dust in the basement.)

Having made a low-risk investment that barely exceeded the day-before cost of a single-day ticket at Liberty or Whitetail, the two closest ski areas to D.C., I next ignored a long series of e-mails urging me to activate my pass. I blame that on CES Advent maxing out my mental bandwidth–but it was also CES that made me realize that I desperately needed a day off, and last week’s snowfall made skiing an obvious way to enjoy Monday.

So I logged into my Epic Pass account for the first time in months last Friday, followed its direction to upload a photo for my pass, and was rewarded with a new-to-me error message: a complaint that my pic “appears to be a celebrity photo.” I tried another image and got the same error message. And after a third unsuccessful try, the site said my photo would have to be manually reviewed.

I then thought to try installing Epic Pass’s app on my phone and activating my pass there, something I don’t remember the site suggesting after the first error. But taking a selfie in that app and selecting it as my profile image led to it crashing without explanation, every time.

My next step was to call Vail Resorts, which itself required digging into its online help to find the support phone number (970-754-1000, for all of you whose searches for those digits led you here). But calling at around 9 a.m. on a weekday and navigating my way through the IVR menu yielded another novel bit of customer-experience unpleasantness: not repetitive hold music or reminders of my call’s importance to them, but absolute silence.

I turned to another support channel listed in the app, the chat function. But the chatbot did even worse, first failing to connect me with a human despite such entreaties as “Please connect me to a human rep” and “Representative” and then flubbing the basic query of “What times do people answer your phone lines?” And the chat UI left the onscreen keyboard blocking my view of what I was typing, a mobile-app interface fail that I couldn’t recall seeing before.

Calling again shortly after 10 a.m. Monday did lead me to a human–so I gather Vail Resorts weekday phone-support hours begin at 8 a.m. Mountain time–but that didn’t get me anywhere either. After a wait to boot up whatever account-access tools this rep could use, she informed me that she couldn’t do anything to liberate my pass, such as removing the photo now stuck in a queue for manual review.

Having to wait for that review process to complete left me unable to use this pass on a cold day with recent snow at Liberty and Whitetail. I instead spent Monday afternoon at Bryce (pictured at left), a compact and budget-priced ski area in the Shenandoah Valley so old-school that it prints out lift tickets instead of issuing RFID cards and still charges only a dollar to rent a locker.

Two days later, somebody at Vail Resorts had done whatever was necessary to confirm I wasn’t perpretating some identity-theft long con (maybe they ran a reverse-image search on my uploaded photo?) and had activated my pass. Which I only knew because I opened the app that morning; some eight hours later, I received an e-mail inviting me to check out my skiing perks now that the pass was active.

That leaves me free to recoup my purchase of last May, subject to something that can be even more fickle than a resort conglomerate’s customer-service machinery: winter weather in the mid-Atlantic.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/01/26/less-than-epic-customer-support-at-epic-pass/

#BryceResort #celebrityPhoto #customerExperience #cx #DCAreaSkiOptions #DCSkiing #EpicPass #liftTicket #SkiLiberty #skiPass #SkiWhitetail #VailResorts