“Psychological aspects of visitor guidance in skiing areas”
Alexander Keul, Salzburg University/TechnicalUniversity of Vienna

Funiculars carry millions of passengers per year alone in Austria. However, a consistent Applied Psychology of the field is still missing. It seems that funiculars/chair-lifts/ski tows as ordinary-looking, everyday objects, like highway service areas or escalators, did not reach “scientific dignity”. Technical means of ascent combine railroad and aircraft by hanging on cables which lift into the third dimension. Different travel body postures – standing, sitting – in a closed cabin or an open chair cause different experiences and fear of flying. The technical apparatus involved is not transparent to lay people, so – similar to airlines – trust plays a major role. Lays and media also have no sense for tribology and the statistics of rare failures. The individual use of funiculars is less frequent compared to public transport and therefore not so prone to habituation. Most funicular experiences are linked with winter sports. Leisure is a change of mind with non-everyday perceptions and emotions. This is also true for the tourist transport situation. The medium becomes the message, a special transport experience is part of sensation and/or relaxation seeking. The conveyance has a double character: Easy, fast climbing together with pleasure and thrill of the transport itself (“the route is the destination”). Do funiculars/chair-lifts/ski-tows make room for all of this in their marketing strategies?

Visitor guidance in skiing areas must watch three main points: Access to the technical means of ascent, way finding in the funicular system/grid, and orientation across the downhill routes and their side-steps. Visitor guidance means behaviour modification – enabling the passenger/skier to get translocated with optimum performance, professional safety and personal comfort. Access to the service may be the first contact with a critical first impression. Since most funiculars are not solitary, the first-glance legibility or readability of the whole system/grid (called “ski swing” in Austria) is important, as in underground systems.

The “cognitive map” of the user, his inner representation of the system, always starts as a simple structure, a “route map”, in new surroundings, and only gets more elaborated (“survey map”) later on – or never. In a structure with impaired legibility and/or elaboration, parts of the service system will escape attention and get ignored. This is more dangerous for shopping centre layouts compared to skiing areas which are designed mostly without dead ends. Skiing routes form a spaghetti shape from central points and get bundled again at the next lifts. Kevin Lynch distinguished five urban orientation structures: Paths, edges, areas, knots, landmarks. What is useful in an unknown city can also be helpful at first contact with skiing areas. Ernst Pfleger will give eye-tracking research results about passenger orientation.

It would be of interest to get fresh, detailed feedback from funicular passengers about the strength and weakness of systems from their point of view. As the impressions are complex and a lot happens throughout the skiing day, general surveys or exit polls are not enough. The author suggests verbal protocols of mystery shoppers as a method to uncover and monitor visitor impressions. A pilot study was done at St.Johann, Tyrol, with four skiers around Easter 2005. The visitors were sent mystery shopping on a free skiing day-trip and had to record positive and negative impressions, especially about the funiculars and chair-lifts, as verbal protocols on Dictaphone tape. It turned out that useful information on orientation and service quality could be collected, but that information on the transport itself was shallow. Therefore, a different approach with Simultaneous Loud Thinking and field interviews will be realized in the future to record and evaluate cognitive overload, orientation errors, stabilizing and distracting factors, waiting times and search for help right in the field situation. Funiculars as public mass transport offer great chances for a fine-tuning of visitor information and comfort.