There’s a giant swath of soft white snow out there that skiers sometimes fail to notice, and resorts are realizing they must use it, if they can, to continue to see skier visits grow. It’s called late season skiing. For years it was left to the few and the highly elevated, but more and more resorts are looking to keep skiers and riders amped at that sweet time of year.

“April is definitely the month that shows the most potential for growth,” says Lucy Kay, CEO at Breckenridge, a mountain blessed with an elevation that holds snow for a good long time. The trick, even for a mountain known to hold snow as long as hers, she says, is holding the interest of skiers for just as long.

The key is events, and not just any kind of events. Breckenridge calls its April season “Spring Massive,” which allows the flexibility to come up with all sorts of events—events intended to draw whatever crowd might otherwise overlook the still deep sweet spring snow. “We try to have even more fun, get a little out of the box in April,” she says.


Gaining Share of Mind
Across the nation, other resorts are doing the same. In the East, where last year’s horrific early season was balanced by an insanely great late spring (eight feet in 17 days in April for Maine; equally impressive amounts for most of the East), resorts found themselves pushing late spring more than they ever had—and, in the end, seeing their numbers almost equal to prior years despite that dismal early winter.

At Bretton Woods, N.H., the pattern of great late season snow has led the marketing team to think hard about skiers and riders at that time of year. “The whole thing is, there isn’t any more snow (in the customer’s) backyard. So they are looking in their garage for their golf clubs or bikes, and that’s just what we don’t want them to do,” says Bretton Woods resort marketing director Craig Clemmer. What to do?

Bretton Woods launched a new marketing effort last year combining Internet advertising and third party endorsement. Where website visitors would normally find staff-created video snow reports, Bretton Woods put instead daily video of customers on the mountain talking about how the skiing was. Web surfers would click onto the site, see an everyday skier (like themselves) talking about how great the snow was, and be motivated to return.

This, coupled with regularly-tweaked Internet advertising, helped drive some big late-season numbers. “We had our best year ever last year, so I believe it worked,” says Clemmer.

Sugarloaf, Maine, where the snow holds on for a long time, figured out the value of the late season a bit earlier—a full two decades ago, when it launched its now-famed Reggae Weekend. Held every season in mid-April, it is the area’s busiest weekend. “Because that event gets so much attention, we hold onto the attention of our guests,” resort PR chief Bill Swain says. Skiers tend to pay attention to Sugarloaf—and its conditions—long after other resorts have closed.

“We hold the snow longer than most others, so we like to crown ourselves the king of spring skiing,” Swain says. Having marketed this way for years, the resort sat in a good position when the snow held last spring.

The late season has been such a success for Sugarloaf that the resort decided to stay open through April school vacation this year, and began to market the idea of an eastern spring skiing vacation for families.

The big-event concept has spread. It’s hard to find a resort—large or small—without some kind of signature spring event. At Stowe, Vt., the event spreads out over weeks in the spring and is called Stowe’s Spring Summit Celebration. It helps keep eyes focused on the snow-covered mountain.

Stowe used a combination of events and more online advertising, where resort spokesman Jeff Wise says the area found it could “be more flexible with trends and market to where we choose, even from day to day.” He believes the shift from print to on-line marketing was key to its late season success last year, in harmony with its events. “We had the events as a mainstay, and then the online advertising gave us the ability to shift in a moment,” he says.

Most resorts are looking toward staying open longer and keeping customers engaged for as long as possible. With Mother Nature’s patterns in recent years, it seems to be the way to go. Says Swain of last season, “We stayed open until April 29th last year.” Did they keep skiers thick until the final moments? Well, no, he admits, but they felt it was just wrong to close. “To tell you the truth, we just didn’t have the heart to close the resort while it was operating at 100 percent,” he says. This year, he hopes, more skiers will remember the late-season potential.

Breckenridge has begun another late-season mission as well: recruiting new skiers and riders to the slopes before the season ends. “If you think about it, it just makes sense,” says Kay. “It’s warm and sunny. The snow is soft. Is there a better time to fall in love with the sport?” The resort is marketing springtime beginner packages and finding that works.

But perhaps the biggest shift in awareness generated by the East’s upside-down 2006-07 season is this: resorts are readying themselves to shift their marketing as needed—whether that means late, early, or even mid-season. As Swain points out, favorable weather at any time of year can help grab the attention of visitors. “Eight feet of snow in the first 17 days of April is a pretty big magnet,” he recalls. Yes, even for the late season.