How Palisades Tahoe boosted food sales by 40% using AI checkout to dramatically shorten lines
Every year, more than 600,000 guests visit Palisades Tahoe, the third largest ski resort in the US, to enjoy the terrain, the snow, and the amazing food and beverages on the mountain. One of 19 ski resorts owned by the Alterra Mountain Company, Palisades Tahoe gained international acclaim when it hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics, and it’s maintained this reputation through its investment in technology and services that delight its guests.
Nobody wants to spend their ski day waiting in lines, but keeping lines to a minimum is hard work for mountain operations. From traffic getting to the mountain, to parking, lifts, and lunch, there are a lot of moving pieces for mountain ops to manage, and many choke points to efficiently get thousands of visitors through each day.
Looking for solutions to eliminate lines at their restaurants and cafes, Palisades Tahoe was working with several constraints common across the industry:
Highly concentrated service hours: Over 70% of food and beverage (F&B) sales happen between 11am and 2pm, making line-busting particularly important to both improve guest experience and maximize F&B sales in under 3 hours each day.
Staffing challenges: Like many ski resorts, Palisades faces seasonal labor challenges and cannot always hire as many staff members as they need. Combined with the highly concentrated service hours, it can become extremely difficult to meet guest demand during peak hours.
As a result of these constraints, Palisades faced long lines at some of their cafes during peak season and had to limit the number of food outlets they could open at the start and end of each ski season due to staffing shortages.
To address these challenges, Christian Andersen, Senior Manager of Food and Beverage at Palisades Tahoe, turned to Mashgin to accelerate F&B service, improve the guest experience, and increase sales without expanding their limited team.
Palisades installed 26 Mashgin AI-powered checkout kiosks, starting with their premier cafe The ARC and later expanding to seven cafes across the resort. Mashgin’s computer vision technology made the checkout process instant and easy for skiers: they simply put down their tray of food and tap their credit card or integrated season pass. The entire transaction takes seconds.
At the same time, each staff member can oversee 4 checkout stations at once, allowing for additional terminals in each cafe and further reducing lines. This also allows team members to focus more on customer service instead of checkout.
The results were also instant: shorter lines and higher revenue. “Before Mashgin, we’d sometimes have lines as long as 15 minutes during the peak season at The ARC,” said Andersen. “Now lines are almost gone completely. Even on the busiest days they will only be 1-2 minutes.” The faster-moving lines boosted sales for cafes by as much as 40% on peak days compared with past years.
Because fewer cashiers are needed for a single outlet, Palisades can now keep more cafes open throughout the year, offering guests more food options and increasing total F&B revenues for the resort.
Lines aren’t the only thing moving faster at Palisades. Managing the day-to-day operations of food service is also more efficient. Mashgin’s cloud-based menu management system combined with new digital menu boards makes updating food options and prices take minutes instead of weeks.
Realtime reporting with customizable grouping and tagging lets the team quickly understand how different cafes, dining formats, or buildings are performing best and which items and categories are driving the most sales. Mashgin’s seamless integration with the Ikon Pass doesn’t just make checkout a breeze for customers, it also helps the Palisades team understand which passholders are driving F&B sales throughout the year.
With the success observed at Palisades, the Alterra Mountain Company is expanding deployments of Mashgin kiosks across its properties to beat the lunch rush and get guests back on the mountain faster than ever.
“With Mashgin lines are almost gone completely. Even on the busiest days they will only be 1-2 minutes.”
Peak ski days saw revenue increases of 40%
Cafe wait times reduced from 15 minutes to 1-2 minutes
Utilizing Mashgin across the resort allowed for staff to keep more outlets open throughout the ski season
