Peak Experience for Ski Industry
“Vail Buys Colorado!” screams the headline in the current edition of a popular skiing magazine. It was a spoof, of course, but one with a smidgen of reality. Vail Resorts Inc., operator of the ski area that is often ranked No. 1 in North America, has proposed buying up three nearby competitors--Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapaho Basin--for $300 million.
If the sale goes through, Vail will wind up with more than 40% of Colorado’s ski market. Its audacity has captured the attention of the lucrative outdoor recreation industry. But Vail is just one slice of a revolution sweeping an industry that has been relatively dormant in the 1990s.
The past year has seen wholesale ski-area purchases and corporate consolidations from New England to California. Resorts are expanding and modernizing. Snowboarding continues to grow in popularity. In California, more than $500 million in expansion projects are planned at resorts at Lake Tahoe and Mammoth Mountain, an eastern Sierra favorite among Southern California’s estimated 1 million skiers.
To many skiers, the biggest new wrinkle is in the design of the skis themselves. The new skis are much wider in the tips and pinched in the middle, forming an exaggerated curve that greatly enhances their turning ability. Some neophytes can carve smooth, sweeping turns with a minimum of training. Intermediate skiers make expert runs with elan.
Manufacturers and resorts are hoping the skis will lure newcomers to the lifts and bring back discouraged dropouts. Ski area usage hit a plateau during the 1990s as daily lift ticket prices--driven in part by the rising cost of liability insurance--soared to the $40 range and then, in some areas, beyond $50.
Expansion is particularly important to resorts in California, where most business has been local and concentrated on weekends and holidays. State resorts are seeking to expand by drawing affluent winter vacationers from the rest of the country and abroad. Those skiers don’t flinch at $50 lift tickets.
All this expansion generally is good for mountain regions that are prone to boom-or-bust economic cycles, sometimes at the whim of the weather. But there also are potential problems, some of which already plague many resorts: environmental degradation, helter-skelter planning, crime, traffic congestion and lack of affordable housing for poorly paid resort workers.
New development planning must deal with those factors from the outset. If done right, the ski industry can soar like a duffer on those radical new skis.
