Firstly I’d like to wish all the loyal aussieskier.com readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Well it’s done. We waited until 20-odd minutes to go before the deadline, but our Platinum Passes for 2012 are purchased, at the princely sum of $1200ea which represents a healthy 171% of the price for every other competing resort.
What was of note was the invoice number on the receipt that was emailed to me. It basically consisted of a lot of leading zeroes and ended in a number in the vicinity of 750. Having recently been involved in the setup of a new ERP system, and observing customers who have done the same I have noticed in most cases that order numbers, invoice numbers, PO numbers etc usually start at zero when a new system is implemented.
When logging in to Buller’s site to purchase the passes it mentioned that they had instituted a new system and I would need to re-log in. Given the move to RFID ticketing that’s understandable.
So what’s the point of all this?
Basically I think it’s reasonable to assume that Buller also started their invoicing at zero and the numbers are in sequence, making my invoice (which had 2 passes on it) approximately the 750th to be issued under the new system.
This doesn’t mean 750 passes as there will be whole families on many other invoices, but I think for argument’s sake it would be reasonable to assume a generous average of about 3 passes per invoice. That totals approximately 2250 passes sold so far, with the deadline for the early-bird fast approaching.
I have heard reliably that Perisher sold about 13,000 season passes, and this figure was all but confirmed by another insider. I also heard that Hotham/Falls were in the 5k-7k vicinity – I directly asked an FC/Hotham employee with access to the figures – this person declined to confirm any numbers but stated that they were ‘very happy’ with the sales. I have no information from Thredbo.
This is all somewhat trivial and speculative, but something worth noting from an innocuous little number on an invoice – it would seem that the price war has resulted in some emphatic disparities in sales figures.
Who has purchased their pass? If you did can you confirm that your invoice number was less than 750 if you purchased prior to today? Who has defected elsewhere thanks to a cheaper pass? Let us know in the comments.
