Alterra Mountain Company is a family of 15 iconic mountain destinations in North America. With its headquarters in Denver, Colorado, Alterra Mountain Company is known for its premier mountain destinations such as Steamboat, Winter Park, Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows and Tremblant, along with the coveted Ikon Pass, granting access to 44 global destinations.
Early on, Alterra Mountain Company understood the importance of accurate weather data to their business and furthered themselves as an industry leader by investing in professional-grade weather station hardware from industry leaders such as Campbell Scientific & RainWise at each of their destinations. While other businesses leverage publicly available weather sources such as airports and schools, Alterra Mountain Company aspired to take each resort’s operations to the next level with this hyper-local mountaintop solution. By executing on this vision, each Alterra Mountain Company destination would be able to power many facets of their operations – from mobile and website ski condition reports all the way down to digital signage in hotel lobbies and resort parking lot alerts – all with truly local weather data.
While weather stations can capture conditions at a single location at a particular point in time, Alterra Mountain Company destinations required additional information streams, such as weather icons from AerisWeather's API to go along with presented conditions. Their search for a complete weather partner took them to AerisWeather, a global Data as a Service (DaaS) provider. AerisWeather offered Alterra Mountain Company a unique value proposition via PWSweather - a platform for weather station owners to manage, monitor and archive local weather data. By sending their mountaintop data to PWSweather, Alterra Mountain Company destinations would be able to achieve a unique one-stop weather solution for each of their mountain resorts.
Alterra Mountain Company headquarters and resort personnel worked in conjunction with Western Weather Group and other hardware partners to specify, install and calibrate each of the weather stations. From there, stations went through an integration process with PWSweather resulting in each station’s data being transmitted up to every five minutes via the cloud and run through a series of ongoing quality control checks. With the installation and integration work complete, each of the station’s data streams were incorporated into the AerisWeather API and became available to power a host of resort-specific applications.
Finally, Alterra Mountain Company software engineers went to work, integrating the AerisWeather API with resort-focused web and mobile applications such as the Ikon Pass app featuring snow reports and weather conditions. With the well-documented API, the engineers were able to request and receive all current conditions needed for each destination with a minimal number of API calls. Supplemental information, like weather icons, are also accessed via the AerisWeather API's forecast endpoint.
Today, Alterra Mountain Company’s destinations provide an all-encompassing look at conditions both before and during guests’ stays. Via on-site, online, and mobile screens, users can stay up to date on conditions at any of their 15 iconic year-round destinations. This allows for improved trip planning so guests can take advantage of optimal weather and fresh powder. Thanks in part to this level of added awareness and transparency, Alterra Mountain Company destinations and Ikon Pass maintain a position as guest-favorite in the winter and outdoor recreation category.
As of the date of this publication, 12 Alterra Mountain Company resort destinations have implemented AerisWeather with Sugarbush Resort, Mammoth Mountain and Big Bear Mountain Resort scheduled for implementation soon.
Alterra Mountain Company
Outdoor Recreation