Lake Tahoe's first online forum for car pooling comes together at Kirkwood

In its continued efforts to improve sustainable measures at the resort, Kirkwood has created a first for a Lake Tahoe resort – an online forum that makes carpooling easy and rewarding.

The Kirkwood carpool forum, the “K-pool” officially launches today at www.kirkwood.com. The forum allows guests from San Francisco, Sacramento, Reno, and around the lake to share and find rides to Kirkwood.

 

To start getting people connected for the season, Kirkwood will give a $20 resort voucher to the first 50 people who set up accounts and post ride requests (voucher recipients will be notified via email). To help get the word out about the ride sharing program, Kirkwood has partnered with Snowbomb www.snowbomb.com, a popular website that provides videos, blogs, event information and community news for the ski resorts around the lake. Snowbomb is offering free Tahoe Cards to the first 1000 accounts that are established on the “K-pool”.

In addition, Kirkwood’s partners O’Neill, Marmot, CLIF Bar and Subaru will be distributing incentives throughout the season to guests who arrive via carpool. 

 

This user-friendly forum allows guests to search by date, time, departing destination and other details in order to contact drivers or riders with similar schedules. Users also have the option to personalize their profiles in order to connect with like-minded individuals (i.e. smoker/non-smoker, early-riser/noon club, skier/snowboarder, etc.).

The carpool forum is easily accessible from any page on Kirkwood’s Web site at http://rideshare.kirkwood.com.

 

“Carpooling is a major environmental initiative for us,” said Allon Cohne, resort marketing director. “This online community will be a useful platform to not only encourage carpooling, but to also reward people who do share the road,” he continued.  “We are taking real steps towards reducing fuel consumption and traffic. The timing of this program’s launch couldn’t be better with Kirkwood’s scheduled opening right around the corner.”

 

A trip to Kirkwood takes the traveler through awe-inspiring scenery along Highway 88, a California scenic highway. The resort’s legendary landscape was featured on the cover of SKI Magazine’s October 2007 issue and the magazine also ranked the resort No. 8 for “snow” in North America.

 

In addition to the carpooling program, Kirkwood is involved in a variety of environmental projects including its lodging rental unit fee with a $1 donation to the National Forest Foundation, a congressionally chartered non-profit partner of the U.S. Forest Service, who will fund projects within the Eldorado National Forest.

 

The resort has also entered into an agreement this year with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to sell “green tags” to guests. “Green tags” are used to help develop new wind power generation facilities in the U.S. and will be available for purchase at all ticket outlets. Kirkwood will match the total “green tag” sales for the 2007-08 ski season to further the resort’s environmental initiatives. For more information, visit www.kirkwood.com.