The history of ski tickets

By Edith Danzer

From 1945/46 the first lift in the Glemmtal provided a comfortable ascent. "In the beginning you paid for every single ascent," recalls Wilfried Höller, former Operations Manager of the Saalbacher Bergbahnen. The point cards were a bit more advanced. Ten rides were stamped on a cardboard, each ride had one field and that was pinched with a hole punch. The punch had a number wheel so that at the end of the day you could see how many trips had been pinched."

CARDS ON RUBBER BANDS
Around the year 1975 the first plastic cards with embossed serial numbers were issued. They were usually used with a zip tie, a fastener with a roll-out rubber band to which the ticket was attached. At every lift in the ski resort you had to pull out the card, reach it through the window of the tiny lift hut and where it was checked in the machine. "But it was annoying to always pull out the ticket and on the zip tie the plastic ticket was painfully flying around in your face on fast descents. So in 1980 when the Skicircus really took off we returned to a visual check: coloured paper cards in a simple plastic cover, worn around the neck with a rubber band. And they were checked at the entry to the valley station," recalls Wilfried Höller.

THE NEW SYSTEM – INSPIRED BY COWS
In 1988, Wilfried Höller had an innovative idea: "I’ve heard from American farmers that their cows had a chip in their ear that showed whether they had already been milked and fed. I wanted such a system for the access to the Skicircus. The company SKIDATA then developed such a chip card – the KeyCard. Back then, you had to hold the card directly to the reader to get a green light to enter."

DREAMS OF THE FUTURE
Franz Holzer, CEO of the Salzburg company SKIDATA further explains: "The status quo is a contactless access to the lifts via a chip card in your pocket. Yet, we are already working on future solutions! In the next one to three years, a smartphone app will be able to replace the smart card. You will no longer worry about forgetting or losing your ski ticket."