The Waze app is a popular app to shave minutes off your commute, but what about a Waze for skiing? A French startup is aiming to do just that. The Skiif navigation application relies on GPS and user data to tell skiers which chairlifts are crowded, where accidents have backed up traffic on the slopes, and other features.
Currently, many ski areas have dedicated applications to display wait times at lifts across the mountain. For example, Winter Park Ski Resort in Colorado has an app that allows users to see where their friends are on the mountain and how long the lift lines are. There is also an application called Slopes that allows users to track their activity on select mountains around the globe. Lalée Pinoncély, the founder of Skiif, believes her creation can outperform what is currently on the market and improve real-time updates and alerts that many applications claim to have.
Pinoncély has been working in the technology sector for about 15 years now. Her achievements include a practical guide published in 2016 by Eyrolles, Premiers pas vers le Digital (First Steps Toward Digital), the Journée de la Femme du Digital (Digital Women’s Day) in 2016, and many others. In 2022, Pinoncély set up a team to create an application that strives to be amongst some of the best navigation apps like Strava or Slopes.
Skiif is designed to be the ultimate app for a day on the resort. Its capabilities include directing skiers around the mountain, linking up with friends, finding points of interest, discovering which lifts have long lines, learning about accidents or other things that should be avoided on the slopes, and more. Pinoncély believes that there is substantial improvement to be made in the navigation industry, and she believes Skiif can advance the market.
Pinoncély explained the common issue that many skiers face on World Crunch.
“The digitalization of station maps is way behind schedule,” she said. “Some operators have their own application, but there’s no general solution, and nothing that provides information on queues, ridership, or accidents.”
Skiif caught a lot of attention over the Christmas holiday, according to Pinoncély. It was such an influx in downloads, that she believed there to be a bug with the application. It was reported that Skiif received several thousand registrations per hour. The application is free to download, although Pinoncély will offer the data collected to the stations.
The start-up has raised over 1 million euros from a pool of investors, along with loans from Bpifrance. Skiif is also seeing interest from TotalEnergies, which uses data to optimize fuel consumption and snow groomer routes.
To see what Skiif was all about, I decided to download it and check it out. The application is currently available on the Apple Store and Google Play. The First thing I noticed is that the select amount of ski areas to choose from are in France, which was expected, especially since the application is in its infancy. Located halfway across the world from the nearest ski area, I couldn’t put the application to the test so I decided to review what I could of the features.
After digging around, I found Skiif’s main features:
- Signaling which trails and lifts are either open or closed
- Displaying icy trails or poor snow
- Marking lifts if they have high attendance
- View backed-up traffic from accidents, etc.
- Tracking ski buddies and marking places to meet up
- Finding directions to places like a restaurant in the village or on the mountain (with the ability to avoid difficult slopes)
- Observe a 3D and 2D trail map of the ski area
- View public transportation and other points of interest
- Set a trail preference
- Call SOS
- And of course where to find the nearest bathroom
The start-up seems to be off to a solid start by providing features that users typically allocate multiple applications for. Although there are a few features that separate it from the market, it appears very similar to Slopes. It will be interesting to see how Skiif develops through the first few versions of the application and if it can truly pull away from the market. Many navigation apps have picked up steam in the snow sports community, such as FatMap, Slopes, OpenSnow, and many more. Will those skiing in France download Skiif and make this the next big navigation app to reach the slopes?
