In a survey conducted by New England Ski Areas Council (NESAC) this past fall at some consumer ski shows, respondents were asked about the information they were getting, or wanted to get, in ski reports. The most telling request on their “wish list” was to see “more truth and accuracy.” It was overwhelmingly the most cited wish.
Maybe this would always have been the case. This writer can recall furious debates on truthfulness in snow reports for all of his 44 years of ski writing. But surely our industry’s image for truthfulness is today at an all-time low, and still sinking. How sad. How very sad!
Some of the examples are really hilarious—or would be if they were not so truly pathetic and embarrassing. For instance, on February 1, Killington started reporting on its 155 trails—up 45 percent from the day before. That’s 48 new trails overnight, with nary a bulldozer or chainsaw in sight. Just lovely creativity driven by a competitive corporate ego. (See also page 36.)
In a follow-up press release, Killington’s explanation was that they were merely being “more consistent with common ski area practices.” Marketing vp John Clifford argued that Killington was put at a competitive disadvantage by the trail counting done by competitors, and that their move would now make skiers “able to make informed decisions about the amount of skiing that is available to them at one time.”
This was on top of the firestorm kindled by Killington last fall by photogrammetrically measuring nine major New England ski areas and then widely publicizing the data as the “true” acreages, vertical drops, miles of trails, gradients etc. The results showed considerable disparity with what these resorts, including Killington, had been showing in their literature.
The winners in all this? Yes, Killington demonstrated it has more toys. It said what everyone already knew and acknowledged: it is very big and the biggest in the East. The loser in all this? There are two: the ski area industry and the skier. And this makes Killington a loser, too.
Killington is absolutely right: our industry lies. The public knows that as fact; it is now being educated as to the degree. (See also the brutal article—truth often is brutal—in December Ski by Dana Gatlin, “Snow Reports: Does Truth Take a Powder?”)
The White Book of Ski Areas—arguably the industry’s most complete and conscientiously assembled statistical profile—is still only as accurate as the data supplied to Editor Bob Enzel by the ski areas. He can offer no rewards for truthfulness, impose no penalties for deceit.
Issues of skier confidence go beyond truth in snow reporting and trail counts. At presstime, details of a dirty little ballot stuffing scandal at Vail — a clumsy attempt to enhance ratings in Snow Country — were appearing in the consumer press. Instead, wouldn’t it be nice if our Killingtons and Vails were leading the way in building public confidence in our industry?
Alas, this is no climate for the honest and conscientious. The meek may inherit the earth in the beatitudes, but not in the ski world. Understandably, areas feel they must live by the laws of the competitive jungle where they do business, and right now, honesty is not among the weapons of choice. And in case we still have not been clear, Killington did not create that jungle; it reacted to it.
Enough hand-wringing. How do we clean up our act? Because right now we are hurting ourselves.
First, let’s concede some points:
- As fingered by the son of a friend of ours, “If there were plenty of snow in Vermont they would all be too busy for this stuff.”
- Though we regret how Killington’s leadership went about it, they may have done the industry a favor by making everyone look into a mirror. Not pretty, but real.
- Let’s also concede an obvious point: the industry is made up of tough-minded entrepreneurs, as independent as they come, and resistant to coercion from any source. Vermont Ski Areas Association (VSAA) is not the agency to impose standards, nor is NESAC, nor is NSAA. It is not their role. Each has its own role to play and it could be fatal to add the referee’s stripes to their uniforms. Or the police-keeping blue helmets of the United Nations.
Standards must be voluntarily arrived at and then voluntarily adhered to.
In our field of publishing there used to be competitive chaos, as magazines and newspapers savaged each other with inflated circulation claims. Out of this eventually came a voluntary mechanism to restore order: the non-profit, jointly administered independent audits of Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) and Business Publications Audit (BPA).
The policy of each is controlled equally by three groups: the publications, the advertisers and the advertising agencies. The standards of circulation honesty are extremely high, and the auditing of all claims is highly professional and vigorous. The penalties for violations range from public correction or withdrawal of the offending material, on up to expulsion.
Where there was once chaos there is now relative order. Not that there is any lack of competitiveness, heaven only knows, between aggressive media entrepreneurs, but the playing field is level as far as circulation is concerned.
Why shouldn’t our industry do the equivalent by helping to create an objective information service, which for convenience here we’ll call XYZ?
To make it work you have to remove control from the ski areas, just as the publications do not control, but voluntarily participate in, ABC and BPA. So, areas would voluntarily participate with membership in XYZ. The most important component (and beneficiary!) is the public, the ski consumer; therefore, the U.S. Ski Association and other ski consumer groups would be invited to join as the second leg of XYZ. Since a third leg is desirable for balance, the media would be invited to join XYZ.
(Right now, inclusion of the media would be tricky: they would not be perceived as trustworthy enough to participate as an XYZ component. Somehow, in the structuring, there would have to be basic reform of the commercialization of snow condition reporting. A tall order!)
The policy-setting board of XYZ would consist of, say, five members from each of the three legs. Obviously, they would be responsible both for setting the standards and for implementing them. In fact, the first task would be to hammer out those standards. Much work has been done in the past (snow condition descriptors, for instance), but there is daunting groundwork to be done in such conundrums as defining what is meant by “trails,” and determining how to measure them.
If an area didn’t want to join XYZ, it certainly wouldn’t have to. The incentive to participate would be that the standards, and especially the earned XYZ imprimatur (seal of approval) would be promoted to the skiing public in such a way that the public learned to accept and trust it.
Would XYZ work? Obviously, the big question. The answer depends on leadership. If it were there—as it has been at critical times in the past— a version of XYZ could be made to work.
Is that leadership there? We would like to think so.
— A SAM editorial
