The instructors view - fuller days, better delivery

The 9am question: a season on snow, from the instructor's side

Written by George Walton, Instructor and co-founder of a ski school in the Portes du Soleil.

How it used to go

Every instructor knows the 9am question, because we all used to ask it: "Who have I got this morning?"

My old routine looked like this. Wake up, check the WhatsApp group, scroll past forty messages to find the schedule photo the boss posted at 11pm, zoom in, squint, work out that I had a private at 9, a group at 10.30 at a different meeting point, and a gap until 2 that might or might not get filled. By the time I got to the lift, half of it had changed anyway.

Then you would meet your clients cold. A family of four, two kids, and all I knew was "2x child group am". What levels? Had they skied with us before? Which instructor did they have last year and what did they work on? No idea. So you spend the first twenty minutes of a paid lesson finding out things the school already knew.

And the dead hours. Standing at the meeting point at 11.30 with nothing until mid-afternoon, watching perfectly good teaching time go past, knowing there were probably clients out there who wanted a lesson but no way of connecting the two.

What changed

Our school moved to SkiOperator, I will admit my first thought was: great, another app. I have taught through three different "systems" at various schools and most of them were built for the office, not for the mountain.

This one is different in one simple way: my schedule lives on my phone, it is always current, and when something changes I know straight away. No screenshot archaeology. No 9am question. I check it over coffee and I know my whole day, meeting points included.

The client notes are the part I would now refuse to work without. Before every lesson I can see who I have got, their level, their history with the school, and what their last instructor worked on. When a returning kid turns up and I say "right, last winter you cracked parallel turns on the blues, so today we are going steeper", the parents visibly relax. That is not a party trick. That is the school looking professional through me.

Fuller days, fewer sprints

The scheduling has made my season better in ways I can count. My days are fuller because gaps actually get filled: when a slot opens up, it gets resold and lands in my schedule instead of dying in someone's inbox. And my days are saner because the system does not book me at Pleney at 12 and Super Morzine at 12.15. Someone finally accounted for the fact that instructors cannot teleport.

More lessons taught means more hours paid, and the hours themselves are cleanly recorded rather than reconstructed from memory at the end of the month. Nobody argues about a timesheet any more because there is nothing to argue about.

The honest summary

Good instructors want two things from the school behind them: fill my days, and let me walk into every lesson prepared. Everything else is noise.

This season I will teach more hours, no sprinting between meeting points, and start every lesson knowing who was in front of me. The boss says they got their evenings back. Fair enough. I got my mornings back.

SkiOperator helps ski schools run smoothly for everyone on the mountain, including the team doing the teaching. Ski school owners can start a free trial at skioperator.com.