What is the first impression of a visitor to Mountain High? It’s packed. “Per square acre, we are probably the busiest resort in the country,” says John McColly, director of marketing for the last decade. Do the math. The area records “roughly 500,000 visits on 100 to 200 acres, depending on the season,” he says. It’s not just the numbers that make Mountain High significant, though: it’s the composition of those numbers.

Mountain High has more than doubled its visits in the past decade through a thorough effort to attract skiers and snowboarders of different ethnicities—a thorny issue for many resorts. But with über-multicultural Los Angeles nearby, the resort has developed a formula for reaching and retaining non traditional snow sliders in the past seven years.

The number-one strategy involves hiring employees, from lift ticket sales to HR to top management, that reflect the demographics they’re hoping to attract. “We have a naturally diverse market, being so close to Los Angeles, so we decided to accentuate that by purposely hiring employees of different ethnicities to make guests feel comfortable,” says McColly. The overarching goal is to “create an environment where everyone feels comfortable, no matter what nationality,” he says. The strategy seems to be working: the clientele is 22 percent Asian, 8 percent Hispanic, 4 percent African American, 48 percent Caucasian, and 18 percent “other.”

McColly does surprisingly little “ethnic marketing” per se. Instead, Mountain High has built a strong following through promotional partnerships with ethnic radio and TV stations. “Having a diverse employee base simply makes guests more comfortable when they get here,” says McColly. “It’s like being the only woman in a sea full of men. You’d be a lot more comfortable if there were some other women around… It also helps us if there is a problem, because overcoming the language barrier does wonders for customer service.”

Add to this scheme city-slicker-friendly lift tickets sold in four-hour blocks, progressive terrain park features throughout, and a number of contests during the winter, and it’s clear that Mountain High prides itself on knowing its customer.


Up Close and Personal
Anyone who has grown up on lily-white ski hills elsewhere in the country and wondered why the slopes aren’t more ethnically diverse should hit Mountain High on a weekend. Suiting up in the parking lot, you get what can only be called a more urban vibe from those around you: Hispanic snowboarders joking with their buddies as they get their boots on; an Asian family making sure everybody has all their gear together before catching the shuttle; an African American couple spraying one another’s pants down with Scotchgard.

Mountain High yields a carefree, rowdy, anything-goes experience that is both refreshing and alive. Whether this stems from the multicultural slant of the guests or from the huge proportion of snowboarders to skiers here is anybody’s guess. But snowboarding is definitely a unifying influence. McColly points out that the super active forums on www.mthigh.com are colorblind and, in his opinion, so is snowboarding: “Honestly, I don’t think snowboarders see color,” he says. “They see style.”

Minority participation has increased every year in the last seven years; two seasons ago the tipping point occurred: minorities outnumbered Caucasians. With minorities now responsible for 52 percent of Mountain High’s nearly half million skier days, the area holds a few lessons for areas elsewhere.


In Their Own Words
Here’s how three Mountain High employees see their resort, and their role in it.


Ramon Baguio
Mountain Experience Coordinator

Ramon Baguio is one of the most visible senior managers at Mountain High, where he has worked for eight years. “I’m on the trails, I’m in the liftlines, I’m sitting on the chair with our guests,” he says. “This makes a huge impression on this market.”

With a job description that spans everything from patrol to facilities maintenance to terrain parks, Ramon, a 43-year-old Filipino-American, summarizes Mountain High’s diversity approach in practical terms: “Embracing diversity in both our employee makeup and in our guests will improve the bottom line and tap a market that wants the attention.”

It’s diversity in action—not lip service—that fires Baguio up. “If you are unable to make an institution comfortable for those of varied backgrounds, you will have much more difficulty assessing their needs,” he says. “The customer needs to see diversity in action, not just in marketing. [They] want to see diversity not just in the stereotypical roles, i.e., lower management or general staff, but especially in the senior management and…on the hill. Marketing can only reach a certain point, and then you must practice what you preach.”

While Baguio does not believe in the promotion of individuals based on their ethnicity, he is proud of what Mountain High has accomplished. “We have been very strong in looking at our people based solely on their strengths and ignoring their race or gender,” he says, adding, “In difficult situations, [such as] injury incidents, the response from a non-white guest changes dramatically to a more positive tone when they meet me for the first time. The guest does notice when an organization like Mountain High promotes strictly on merit and achievement.”


Ryan Kevin Ho
Snowboard Instructor

According to Ho, Mountain High’s successful approach is all about the welcome mat rolled out to staff and guests alike. “It doesn't matter who you are, or where you’re from, everybody is welcome!” he says.

With two years now under his belt at Mountain High, the 26-year-old Chinese-American knows that the California resort is special. “Being the closest winter resort to Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties makes us unique,” he says. “Though there are other mountains that may be able to say something similar, none of them have the luxury of being situated within the melting pot of Southern California, where action sports of all sorts are being pushed to the forefront by all races. It shows on our slopes, where, in my 13 years of riding, I’ve never seen a more ethnically diverse crowd than at Mountain High.”

As a snowboard instructor, Ho has as much contact with guests as just about anyone in the resort. How does he see the Mountain High welcome mat function in real life? “Diversity in the staff definitely helps to promote diversity on the slopes,” he says. “It helps different races not feel like they don’t belong and not feel awkward or out of place… It helps us identify with our guests better, and it helps our guests identify with us better.”

Ho reckons resorts around the country can learn from the Mountain High example. “If they want to survive in the long run, then yes—they should take a look at what we’re doing to promote a more multicultural face. Southern California is a melting pot, and it’s going to boil over and spread all over America. Winter sports are also going to continue to grow, and people are going to want to explore their options across the country.”


Sherman M. Lett
Mountain Resource Manager

Lett, 55, knows that the clientele and the product aren’t totally separate entities and will always be intertwined. “We are unique because of our clientele,” says Lett. “In our location we have a diverse mixture of cultures, and being able to provide a great service to each one is proof of our flexibility and willingness to make sure that everyone enjoys themselves.”

Sherman, a 10-year African-American veteran of the resort, says Mountain High’s location near L.A. is a crucial part of the cultural diversity equation. “I don’t think other resorts have as many different cultures as SoCal has.”

That availability, along with conscious effort, attracts both non-white guests and staff. “We are trying very hard to make that change, going from a predominately white American culture to a multicultural resort,” he says. “Change and understanding of different cultures does not happen overnight.

“The diverse staff makes everyone step back and try to understand other cultures,” he says. “It is nice to see the change in our staff meetings since I started here in 1997.”

The Guest Editor’s Take
We are in the midst of a long trend of flat growth, so actively reaching out to new markets is imperative. Mountain High demonstrates one way to accomplish this. Another step: taking a sample of the resort product directly to these markets. In its second year, the Ruby Hill Rail Yard, Winter Park’s terrain park in a Denver city park, has done just that. It provides snowsports access to inner-city kids. Recently, I drove through the Latino neighborhood surrounding Ruby Hill and watched as a smiling group of four kids walked to the park sharing one snowboard among them.

Still, getting a diverse market to visit the resort is a different challenge. Mountain High clearly leads the way in building an organization around the goal of attracting diverse markets to the resort. Structuring its marketing, hiring, and guest experience to attract a variety of ethnicities to their resort has proven to be a model worthy of catching up to. Hopefully this article will spur discussion among senior leaders of resorts that want to reach out to diverse markets. It would be foolish to think we’ve tried all the ways we can to reach out to new audiences.

—Bob Holme