To celebrate the arrival of winter in New England (now that it is March), I took to the slopes of a local ski area where they have installed an electronic ticket system. Each skier gets a plastic access card to slip into a pocket. Instead of waiting in line to buy tickets, you can charge your card online. When you arrive at the hill, you simply put on your skis and go. At the lift, you slide through a turnstile that lets you pass after reading the card in your pocket. At the end of the day, there are no sticky tickets or wires to remove. Furthermore, if you are interested, you can log in and see how many runs and vertical feet you skied.

The ski area benefits too by reducing staff at the ticket window and no longer paying ticket checkers at the lift lines. They can also collect great market data. They know exactly who is buying tickets, when they arrive, when they leave, how many runs they take, how fast they ski, and which lifts they ride.

Sound great? In many ways it is, for both customers and the business. By using existing technology and applying it to a new situation, the company providing this new system created great value.

But they missed one critical step. They can not have done a proper test drive. They didn’t walk through the process either literally or in their heads. While I believe they will continue to use the system, I also suspect they have a lot of rework to do this summer.

First, they used regular turnstiles like you would find at a subway entrance and added flimsy verticals on either side. Getting between the verticals with ski poles, ski clothes, snowboard gear, etc., is not a smooth process.

Second, each of the two turnstiles has its own line. Thus, pairs need to go through consecutively, not simultaneously, and then regroup.

Third, and worst of all, both turnstiles dump skiers down a slight slope into the same small space just short of the loading area. It’s a struggle, even for good skiers and boarders to avoid shooting into others or out in front of the approaching chair. Beyond the chaos and anxiety, it is not uncommon for chairs to go empty while people pick themselves up off the ground, untangle poles, or try to figure out who goes next.

Fourth, occasionally a card can’t be read properly and the poor skier, after setting off the alarm multiple times, has the awkward task of backing out of the slot, negotiating the crowd behind him, and returning to the lodge.

Fifth, the verticals next to the turnstiles are there to hold up super cool LED screens above the heads of  the passing skiers. If these screens provide valuable data, I’ll never know because my attention is always on the turnstile and the people I’m about to run into. This is just wasted money.

While the necessary changes are obvious to see, they will involve non-trivial expenses. All they have to do is move the turnstiles back from the lift, merge the lines before rather than after the turnstiles so pairs can pass through simultaneously, eliminate the slope toward the lift, and provide an escape route to accommodate those denied access. But even that plan deserves a test drive.

You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive. Make test drives a habit in other things too. Save yourself a pile of trouble and money by insisting on a walk through at least before finalizing plans and completing the implementation.