AI Transparency

AI is used in six areas on the platform:

• AI overviews — short "About this resort" / "About this school" / "About this instructor" summaries at the top of detail pages. Generated from the entity's own data (description, slope counts, ratings, certifications, etc.) and cached server-side.
• AI Resort / School / Instructor finder — you describe what you want in plain language ("family resort with a beginner area in Austria") and the AI ranks matching options with reasons. Picks are one signal among several; the directory's own ranking still applies.
• AI Chatbot — answers questions about resorts, schools, lessons, and the booking flow. Disclosed as AI on the first message.
• Gear recommendations — a short questionnaire about your ability and conditions feeds an AI ranking of equipment products.
• Quick Lesson Notes — when an instructor records a note, the audio is sent to a speech-to-text service. The transcript, together with any student name, activity and level supplied by the instructor, is then sent to the configured text-model provider to clean the note, generate a title and extract action items.
• Editorial helpers (admin-only) — admins can ask the AI to draft FAQ answers, summarise long reviews, or extract data from a school's website. Output is reviewed and edited by a human before it goes live.

The decisions that affect your booking are made by people, not by AI:

• Verification — A Find a Ski School administrator makes the approval decision on school and instructor verification applications. AI may assist with pre-screening, but it cannot approve an application. Find a Ski School labels a school's current verification status, an instructor's own approved application and affiliation with a verified school as three separate signals. Evidence-specific checks appear separately only when the platform stores evidence for that capability. Verification is a scoped platform status, not an endorsement or a guarantee of quality, safety, competence, legal permission to work, insurance cover or lesson outcome. Check any evidence that matters to your decision.
• Reviews — anyone with an email-confirmed Find a Ski School account may submit a review. Reviews linked to an eligible completed booking through Find a Ski School are labelled “FASS Verified Booking”; other reviews show their source or verification status and do not receive that label. Providers can respond but cannot remove negative feedback. Suspected abusive content is reviewed by humans.
• Bookings — every booking is a contract between you and the provider shown at checkout — a ski school or an independent instructor. The provider confirms or declines; we facilitate but are not party to the contract.
• Moderation — flagged content (reviews, messages, questions) is reviewed by humans before action.

Schools can buy promotion from us — sponsored placement, prime positioning on resort pages, and a paid subscription tier. Because that money could otherwise quietly shape what the AI recommends to you, here is exactly where it does and does not reach:

• It does not change the match criteria — the \u201cMatches n/N criteria\u201d count the AI finder shows against a school is read from the school's own listing \u2014 the activities, levels, ages, languages and places it says it covers \u2014 against what you typed. Paid promotion is not one of those criteria and cannot change the count, so a school cannot buy a better-looking match.
• It does not affect the order either — promotion plays no part in how results are ordered — not as a signal and, since 2 August 2026, not even as a tie-break between equal scores. Ties are broken by earned quality and review count. Paying cannot move a school up the list at all.
• Sponsored slots are fixed and labelled — separately from ranking, a limited number of directory positions are sold as sponsored slots. These are always marked "Sponsored" where they appear, and they do not displace organic results — they sit alongside them.

If you would rather compare without any of this, every directory listing can be sorted by rating or by price, which ignores promotion entirely.

AI-generated text can be inaccurate, out of date, or misleading. Common failure modes we've seen:

• An overview mentions a feature the resort no longer offers (e.g. a closed lift, a discontinued ski school).
• An AI Finder pick ranks a school highly because the school's listing claims a specialty we haven't independently verified.
• The chatbot answers a question with confident but incorrect detail (a hallucination).

How to flag a wrong AI output: every detail page has a "Suggest correction" link in the page footer. For chatbot replies, use the thumbs-down feedback button at the bottom of the response. We re-generate overviews when the underlying entity facts change, so a corrected listing fixes the AI summary on the next refresh cycle.

For booking-affecting questions (price, availability, lesson content), always check the school's own website or contact the school directly. The AI overview is a quick read, not a binding source of truth.

We use third-party processors for AI features. Quick Lesson Notes sends the recording to a configured speech-to-text service, then sends the transcript and lesson context to the text-model provider selected for the lesson-notes feature. That text provider is configurable; supported options include Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq, Together AI, Mistral, DeepSeek, OpenRouter and xAI. Ask us for the active subprocessor list.

Find a Ski School does not train AI models on your data. We don't run our own foundation models, and we don't fine-tune third-party models on your queries, conversations or profile. That promise doesn't depend on any third party and stays constant.

What the providers do with the inputs we send is governed by the contract and Data Processing Addendum for the provider active at the time. The provider can change, so the two links below are examples rather than a complete current list. Contact [email protected] for the active provider and applicable terms.

• Anthropic — anthropic.com/legal/dpa
• Google — cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-addendum

Training and provider-side retention terms differ by provider and may change. The applicable contract for the active provider is authoritative; do not assume the same retention period applies to every supported provider.

What crosses the boundary:

• To providers: entity facts used for overviews, AI Finder queries, gear-questionnaire answers, chatbot messages and, when Quick Lesson Notes is used, the audio recording, raw transcript and any student name, activity or level supplied. The text provider receives the transcript to clean it, generate a title and extract action items.
• Not to providers: payment details, GPS lesson tracking, booking history and account data that is not included in a request or lesson-note context. Quick Lesson Notes is the exception described above: its audio, transcript and supplied lesson context do cross the processor boundary.

Server-side AI calls are logged on our infrastructure for analytics and abuse review. These logs record which feature was used, which model answered, token counts and timing — not the content of your conversation. See the Privacy Policy section "AI-powered features & automated processing" for the full legal-basis breakdown.

Some user-facing AI surfaces can be turned off independently. These settings do not control Quick Lesson Notes, which an instructor chooses whether to use. The settings below persist in your browser; signed-in users see the same toggles in Account Settings → AI features. Either surface writes to the same local store.

Other options:

• The chatbot is opt-in — you have to open it to use it, and the first reply tells you it's an AI. Closing the chat ends the conversation; the history stays in your browser for 24 hours after your last message, and nowhere else.
• Gear recommendations only run when you explicitly fill in the questionnaire. Not filling it in is the opt-out.
• The AI Finder only runs when you type a query into its input. The directory itself works without touching it.
• Quick Lesson Notes does not offer a manual-only mode or collect a learner consent record. If you do not want audio or AI processing, ask the instructor not to use Quick Notes and request a manually written recap through another agreed channel.
• You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your AI-related data at any time. See the Privacy Policy section "Your rights" for how to do that.

Questions or a wrong AI output to flag? Contact us.