With the advent of text messaging pagers are less-common in our schools and workplaces these days, but on the ski slopes it appears that they’re making something of a comeback. Unlike your hi-tech smart phone with its hundreds of applications designed to entertain and amuse your friends, on the slopes pagers can be the difference between life and death. Of course, it’s not all serious; pagers can also have fun implications for your ski holidays. Here are a few ways that pagers have their uses on the slopes.

Avalanche Warning System

When pagers are talked about in ski resorts they’re often referred to as ‘avalanche beacons’. You’ll find that avalanche beacons are slightly bulkier than your average hospital beeper and this is because the buttons need to be activated in extremely cold weather. The usual avalanche beacon is a paperback-sized pager that helps with the search and rescue operation in the event of an avalanche. The alarm is more often used by professional skiers and snowboarders that are going off-piste, however, there is no reason that these pagers shouldn’t be worn by everyone taking to the slopes. In France, it currently takes the search and rescue team an average of 45 minutes to reach the site of an accident; in this time-frame approximately 75% of victims will be dead.

The avalanche beacon has two modes – transmit and search. In the transmit mode the victim trapped by an avalanche can emit a signal, which is then picked up by another pager switched to search mode. More advanced avalanche beacons used by professional organisations can also give an indication of distance and direction, to a range of 20 metres.

Restaurant Reservations

Anyone that’s ever been on a skiing holiday will remember how packed the resort restaurants get in the evening. It seems that as soon as darkness descends on the slopes, the crowds make their way to the restaurant – which can make getting a table hard if you don’t have a reservation. Luckily, the hospitality industry has found a solution to this and restaurant pagers have been introduced to many ski resort restaurants. The concept of the restaurant pager is fairly simple: guests are given a pager which alerts them when a table becomes free, so instead of queuing for a table outside in the snow, you can wait in a bar knowing that your pager will beep the moment a table becomes free.

Contact your Staff

If you’re staying in a serviced chalet, you’ll probably be given a beeper in order to contact your staff and, similarly, your staff will be able to contact you via your pager. If you’ve decided on a home-cooked meal cooked for you by your chalet maid, then she’ll be able to buzz you and let you know ten minutes before your casserole is due out of the oven. Likewise if you’ve left your children with an au-pair and find that the queues for the ski slopes stretch for miles, then with a pager you can contact the au-pair and let her know that you’ll be delayed. In the event of an emergency, your au pair can send you a discreet buzz on your pager letting you know that you’re needed back at home.

Author Bio: Jenny Kettlewell is the Marketing Manager for Multitone Systems, a tele communications strategies company that has provided pagers and paging systems for organisations in the public and private sector for many years.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: pagers