Drawing on four decades of ski know-how, Perfect Piste turns hard-won human insight into a hyper-intelligent AI ski agent for wealthy travellers. Jenny Southan speaks to CEO Edward Byrne about the future of ski trip design.

What exactly is Perfect Piste?

Launched in October 2025, Perfect Piste is a luxury AI ski agent that uses 40 years of Powder Byrne knowledge to recommend the perfect resort, hotel and even room type for the way you ski and the kind of trip you want.

Can you give a quick overview of Powder Byrne and your role in it?

Powder Byrne is a second-generation family business started by my father over 40 years ago. He was a young entrepreneur and passionate skier who saw a gap in the market for redefining the luxury family ski experience in the European Alps, particularly for UK clients.

We’re a British-Swiss family, and I grew up between the Swiss mountains and London, surrounded by both skiing and a very “tour operator plus hospitality” model of high-touch, family-focused care. Today Powder Byrne is still very much about that: we design and operate luxury family ski holidays, summer trips and mountain adventures, with our own staff on the ground running the experience end-to-end.

I joined the board about ten years ago, then became CEO. My background is slightly unusual for a tour operator – I’m a lawyer by training, I’ve worked in media planning and digital strategy, and I founded a tech company back in 2015. All of that has fed into how I now think about innovation, technology and the future of the business.

Why did you decide to create Perfect Piste?

Over four decades we’ve built up a huge amount of very specific local knowledge: which blue runs feel like reds, where the best mountain hut is for a non-skier, which hotel actually works for a family with teens versus toddlers, where the snow holds late in the season, and so on.

At Powder Byrne, we share that knowledge one-to-one, through conversations with our clients. Perfect Piste is about capturing that accumulated intelligence and making it accessible in a new way – as an AI agent that can work with you instantly, at any hour, and get to know you very quickly.

It sits at the opposite end of the spectrum to Powder Byrne. Powder Byrne is high-touch, human-led service. Perfect Piste is purely digital: no on-the-ground service, just extremely smart guidance and access to carefully chosen inventory.

How is Perfect Piste different from just asking a general AI like ChatGPT where to ski?

The big difference is that Perfect Piste is a closed, specialist system trained on our own data rather than the open internet.

A general AI can tell you “the top ten ski resorts” or list websites where you can book. What it cannot do is say: “Given how you ski, and the fact your partner doesn’t, this hotel in this Swiss resort is ideal – the terrace looks onto the piste where your kids finish lessons, there’s a vegetarian restaurant 600 metres away that you’ll love, and the best glühwein kiosk is just to the left of the gondola.”

Perfect Piste is built on our internal knowledge: destination notes, hotel and room-level insight, and detailed ski intelligence we’ve written and refined over months. It’s not scraping reviews; it’s using what our teams and partners on the ground actually know.

Where will Perfect Piste be available first, and when?

We’re launching initially in Switzerland, because that’s where our knowledge is deepest and most consistent. The platform is live in terms of web presence, and the AI agent will be fully usable by Christmas.

We’ll roll it out carefully to the world’s best ski destinations, including Zermatt, St Moritz, Flims, Laax, Arosa, Villa Sur-Ollon, Grindelwald and Andermatt. It will be invitation-only at first, with capped usage. That’s partly to protect the integrity of the data and partly because we want to ensure the experience is genuinely excellent before scaling.

How does it work from a user’s point of view?

You’ll interact with Perfect Piste much like you would with a very knowledgeable ski concierge, but faster. You tell it about the kind of trip you’re planning, when you want to travel, who’s coming with you, and how you ski. From there, it will recommend specific destinations that match your style and needs, specific properties – not just the hotel, but the room type or configuration that works for your party, and options that are bookable directly through the platform. Then, as your trip approaches, Perfect Piste can continue supporting you with relevant information on snow conditions, for example.

You mentioned that it asks “how you ski” in quite a different way. What does that mean?

Most systems ask you to tick a box: beginner, intermediate, expert; blue, red, black. As lifelong skiers, we know that’s incredibly crude. Two “experts” can ski in totally different ways – one loves steep couloirs, the other loves long, cruising blues. We’ve identified 52 distinct ski types including: carving and technical, freeride, heli-skiing, race skiing, glacier skiing, expedition-style trips, peak winter, spring skiing and family ski. Perfect Piste will ask you to describe how you ski and what you enjoy, in your own words, then map that to these defined types. In testing, even long, chatty descriptions usually distil into a few very strong signals that make your ski profile quite unique. That’s far more useful than just “advanced skier”.

So it doesn’t just say, “You’re an expert, go to Verbier.”

Exactly. It might say: “You love fast, flowing blue and red runs, you have two young children learning, and your partner doesn’t ski. You’ve done Verbier; for this trip, this other Swiss resort will give you better terrain for your kids, easier pistes you’ll still enjoy, and a hotel layout that suits your family.”

It isn’t about pushing you back to the same “big name” resorts every time. In fact, one of the things I’m most excited about is how Perfect Piste can surface smaller, lesser-known Swiss resorts – the kind of places we’ve always loved at Powder Byrne – and match them to skiers who would never otherwise discover them.

Where does all the underlying information come from, and how long did it take to train?

We’ve been training the model for about eight months. It’s been a big piece of work. Around 80% of the content is written by our own team and partners – people who have lived or worked in these resorts for years. The rest is factual infrastructure such as distances and timetables.

How will people actually access Perfect Piste?

We’re launching it first as a web-based experience, with a clean interface that’s closer to Perplexity than a long chat thread – because most users want clarity and recommendations, not endless conversation. It will also be available as a custom GPT and, in time, as a WhatsApp-based agent. Initially it will be text-based; voice interaction will follow.

The key point is that memory is always on. Unlike many general AIs, which default to no memory, Perfect Piste’s whole value lies in remembering you: your ski history, your preferences, your previous trips and your travelling companions.

Is there a cost to use it, or is the business model purely travel sales?

There will be no subscription cost to use Perfect Piste in its first year. It functions as a specialist AI travel agent: it doesn’t just advise you, it also connects you directly to bookable inventory – high-end hotels, apartments and, in future, chalets. Revenue comes from the travel side, not from selling access to the AI itself.

You’ve talked about Perfect Piste being invitation-only and capped. Why the limits?

The platform will launch with an initial cap of 9,000 consumers and 1,000 agent users. This is for two main reasons.

First, data and IP protection. The knowledge we’re using is proprietary – it’s our team’s expertise, written and structured specifically for this product. By keeping Perfect Piste closed, we prevent that data being crawled and absorbed into large open models.

Second, sustainability and responsibility. AI isn’t free from an environmental point of view: large-scale, uncapped usage has a carbon footprint. In skiing, we’ve been engaging with sustainability for decades – from snow farming to energy use in resorts – and we don’t want to ignore that when it comes to digital tools.

So we’re taking a “responsible AI” stance: controlled usage, clear purpose, and participation in Swiss sustainability initiatives to ensure the way we deploy AI aligns with long-term mountain stewardship.

What do you ultimately hope Perfect Piste will achieve for skiers?

I’d love it to do two things really well.

First, help people ski better, more intelligently, and in the right places for them – whether that’s a first family trip, a big heli adventure or a gentle return after an injury.

Second, open up the map. If Perfect Piste can introduce you to a small, family-run hotel in a lesser-known Swiss resort that becomes your favourite place on earth, and you go back year after year, I consider that a success – even if you don’t “need” the AI next time.

In the end, it’s still about human connections in the mountains. AI is just the tool that helps get you to the right snow, at the right time, in the right way.