How switching to SkiOperator saved us!

A season without the spreadsheets: one ski school owner's journal

Written by a ski school owner and director in the Portes du Soleil

December, two years ago

If you run a ski school, you know exactly what my Decembers used to look like. Three spreadsheets that never agreed with each other. A WhatsApp group with 22 instructors, all asking who they had at 9am. Booking enquiries arriving by email, Instagram, our website form and, once, a note left at the lift pass office.

Every evening, after teaching all day, I sat down with a glass of something red and manually rebuilt the next day's schedule. One late cancellation and the whole thing collapsed. I once double-booked our best instructor for a private lesson and a group of six-year-olds at opposite ends of the resort. He still brings it up.

We were a good ski school running on chaos. And the chaos had a cost we could not see: clients who never came back because confirming a lesson took three emails, and instructors sitting idle at 11am while another was sprinting between meeting points.

The switch

We moved everything onto SkiOperator before last season. I will be honest, I expected the migration to be painful. It was not. Bookings, clients, instructor availability and pricing all went in during a quiet week in November, and by the time the first snow properly arrived we were live.

The first thing that changed was the phone. It went quiet. Clients booked online, picked their times, paid, and got their confirmations without me touching anything. The enquiries that did come in were real questions, not "can you resend my confirmation".

What the season actually felt like

The scheduling is where I felt it most. SkiOperator sees the whole picture: who is qualified for what, who is where, who has a gap. Instead of me juggling it in my head at 10pm, the schedule builds itself around the bookings, and I just review it. When a client cancelled a private at short notice in February half term, the busiest week of the year, we had the slot resold before lunch.

Our instructors noticed too. Fewer dead hours, cleaner handovers between lessons, and everyone sees their own schedule on their phone. Nobody asks me who they have at 9am any more. I miss it slightly. Not really.

The bit I did not expect: clients coming back

The part that has genuinely changed our business is retention. Every client, every child's level, every lesson they have taken with us lives in one place. When last year's families started planning this winter, we could reach them with the right offer at the right time, and greet returning kids by name with an instructor who already knew where they left off.

Our rebooking rate this season was the best in our history. That is not a coincidence. Families come back to ski schools that remember them.

Would I go back?

To the spreadsheets, the WhatsApp storms and the 10pm scheduling sessions? Not for anything. The strange thing about fixing your admin is that you get your actual job back. I spent more time on snow this season than I have in years, teaching, watching our instructors work, talking to families at the meeting point.

That is what we started a ski school to do. SkiOperator just lets us do it.

SkiOperator is a booking and operations platform built for ski schools and mountain activity operators. Start your free trial at skioperator.com.