In the golden age of ski school about 40 years ago, taking a lesson had sex appeal. Instructors with thick Austrian accents exhorting their pupils to “bend zee knees” became an iconic image of what skiing in North America was all about.

More recently, ski and ride schools have been losing not just their glamorous luster, but their guests, too. According to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), the total volume of lessons last year dropped 10.2 percent, compared with a drop in skier visits of just 4.8 percent. The disproportionate decline in lessons continues a trend that has set in over the last several years. According to NSAA, “the proportion of visits which include a lesson has declined over the past four seasons, dropping from 8.6 percent in 2005-06 to 7.6 percent in 2008-09. Declines over the period have been noted in every region and size grouping.”

The downward trend is a wake-up call. Are ski and ride schools giving guests what they want and need?


HOOKING NEWCOMERS
No single word says value to customers more effectively than “free.” Many ski areas are understandably reluctant to give away lessons, but the Vermont Ski Areas Association has had success for the last two seasons with its Free Learn to Ski/Ride Week in early January this year (in conjunction with the national Learn a SnowSport Month campaign). More than 3,300 first-time skiers and riders have gone through the program, which includes a free one-day lesson, beginner lift ticket, and rentals. Approximately 900 skiers and riders—27 percent—in the program have followed up with additional visits and/or lessons.

Some areas are seeing success through highly discounted intro programs coupled with follow-up incentives to encourage continuation in the sport. A great example is Greek Peak, N.Y., participating with other local areas in the Mountains of Fun program. The deal: $25 per session for a three-day learn-to-ski program. Plus, anyone who completes all three days can get a $75 discount off a season pass at the least expensive rate, as well as half-priced tickets at Whiteface.

The program has been remarkably well received, according to Kevin Morrin, Greek Peak’s director of sales and marketing. “We’re pretty much a lesson factory,” says Morrin. “We do about 9,000 people in a season in the program, and around 1,200 stick through the full three days.” About 200 of them even buy the discounted passes.

Sugarbush, Vt., is introducing a program this year that puts more of the value emphasis on the post-lesson incentive rather than on heavily discounted lessons. The three-day intro-to-ski-or-ride program, at $220, is not deeply discounted, but the reward for completion is a free season pass to Sugarbush.

“We need to find better ways of keeping the first-timers,” says Sugarbush president Win Smith, “because that’s where the growth is. We need to fight the perception of this being a very expensive sport.”

Maine ski areas have taken an innovative approach to bringing in new skiers: Rather than bring people to lessons, bring lessons to the people. Small ski areas play a critical role in bringing new skiers and riders into the sport—at the smallest areas surveyed in the NSAA Kottke report, 60 percent of all lessons were Level 1, double that of the largest areas. Recognizing that smaller areas are new-skier breeding grounds, larger resorts in Maine—i.e., Sunday River and Sugarloaf, plus mid-sized Shawnee Peak– have been cooperating with smaller resorts to bring more new skiers and riders on board.

In the state’s Learn to Ski and Ride card program, $89 buys a three-day package: 1) beginner day lesson, including beginner lift ticket and rentals, at a smaller area, followed by 2) a second day of skiing (with rentals) at that area, followed by 3) a third day of skiing and rentals at one of the larger resorts. Sunday River and Sugarloaf have even sent some instructors to help with lessons at the smaller areas. “You take some of the intimidation away by starting at a smaller, community area, followed up by the treat of going to the larger resort,” says Ski Maine’s president Greg Sweetser.


BRINGING BACK THE CORE
Providing ski and ride school value for more advanced skiers and riders presents a different set of challenges and strategies. This is a growing audience, with the proportion of advanced and expert skiers and riders increasing from 39 percent to 43 percent since the 2001-02 season. But this audience is also much less likely than first-timers to take a lesson. Just eight percent of intermediates and four percent of advanced/expert skiers go to school, according to NSAA.

Two basic strategies that have yielded success at some areas in bringing value to more advanced skiers and riders have been a reduction in class size and a moderation of pricing.

A couple of years ago, for example, Killington began limiting the size of its kids’ classes to five, following a lead set by Park City Mountain Resort, according to Killington communications director Tom Horrocks. The kids program was so popular and successful that last winter Killington began instituting a max-five limit on all adult lessons as well.

Horrocks acknowledges that this presents guests with a double-edged sword—slightly higher pricing ($59 to $65 per lesson) but a far better learning experience. “We believe strongly in the value it provides,” says Horrocks. “People are learning more because classes are smaller. And it provides a positive experience for instructors as well, because they are actually able to teach” rather than spending much of their time simply herding larger classes around.

Recognizing that “school” and “lesson” are often words that can have a repellent effect on more advanced skiers and riders, Vail Resorts (VR) has come up with its Adventure Session program. The program’s tagline: “If ski school had recess, this would be it.”

Bobby Murphy, Keystone’s director of skier services, acknowledges a fundamental challenge that VR—or any ski area—faces in this arena: “A lot of season-pass holders feel they don’t need ski and ride school.” VR hopes to bust through that barrier first through value pricing—a very reasonable $119 to $129 per person, depending on resort, for the all-day program. Second, the resorts promote line-cutting privileges and small (maximum of five) group sizes, refer to group leaders as “guides” rather than instructors, and emphasize mountain tactics rather than skiing technique.

Murphy says a big part of the program’s success comes from selling the sexiness of bringing outsiders into the inner circle of local cool. “It’s not about a lesson,” he says. “It’s about learning to ski the mountain like a local.”

Offering specialty clinics to address the niche interests of more advanced skiers is not new—many resorts have had success with women’s clinics in particular. Yet those areas that have done well with niche programs know these are moving targets, changing as customer demand changes. A demand for mogul lessons, for example, might be supplanted by a rising demand for tree-skiing lessons. Ski and ride schools have to pay attention to keep up with changing demands, and also recognize that those demands differ from one area to the next.

Jay Peak, for example, makes the most of one of its greatest assets, lots of gladed terrain, by offering glade-skiing clinics. Similarly, after a kids program at Sugarbush focusing on off-piste adventure and backcountry safety proved popular, the area last year began offering similar clinics for adults.

Lessons present a revenue opportunity that extends beyond the learning experience itself. “No one spends more time with a guest than an instructor, and lesson-takers typically spend more than non-lesson takers,” says Andy Hawk, marketing director of PSIA-AASI. This suggests that price reductions can be recouped by developing loyal, bigger-spending customers.

SAMMY Guest Editor’s Take
I suspect every resort has a conversation each year about how they might better penetrate the 90-plus-percent of their guests who are not participating in ski school, but after last year's economic environment caused a dramatic, double-digit drop in ski school revenue at all of our resorts, we had to get serious. We did surveys, interviews and focus-groups with our guests who were not already participating in ski school to better understand what they might be interested in. We came up with the Adventure Sessions program that Peter explains here. Separately, we talked to our guests who were already participating in our children's ski school programs, and found an opportunity there to provide smaller children's classes at a premium. Both programs have been successes from a guest-satisfaction standpoint, and the children's program was a financial success from day one. Interest is building in the Adventure Sessions program, but it's a classic marketing challenge of interesting someone—in this case our more experienced guests, mostly passholders—in a service that they don't think they need.

We've also embraced more specialty programs than ever, and invited in more outside partners to come in to host programs with our ski school. The specialty programs like Peter describes—women's programs, terrain-park programs, telemark programs, etc.—attract incremental participants who would otherwise just go skiing on their own. And outside partners bring built-in followers of their own.

If there were any easy, slam-dunk, hugely profitable ski school opportunities, I would expect that they would already have been discovered and implemented. This means that any new initiatives are likely to take some investment to build, and are likely to be lower-margin opportunities than existing programs. This is where most of our efforts to generate incremental participation in ski school have died in the past. It's tough to keep financial analysts and even ski school managers from trying to kill new programs in a never-ending quest for efficiency and margin management.

We're convinced that new programs must be financially sustainable on their own, but we're equally as convinced that the more guests we can get to participate in our ski school programs, the more guests our incredibly talented instructors will turn into loyal customers who spend more, buy club memberships and real estate, and become advocates for our resorts—a return far larger than just the ski school contribution.

—Chris Jarnot, SVP/COO Vail Mountain