The Wachusett “map” was a road map and set of directions to other nearby ski areas. Officials at the popular area near Boston, Mass. handed out the maps, along with a two-liter bottle of Polar soda (courtesy of Wachusett’s owner), to disappointed skiers turned away at 8:30 in the morning on January 16, 17 and 18—the three-day Martin Luther King Day holiday weekend—because the area was already sold out.
“We gave out 3,000 maps,” said David Crowley, general manager. “We actually sold out five straight days and nights, beginning on Thursday day. It was unbelievable. We had people who had driven up from Manhattan, from Rhode Island and Connecticut. We turned away an awful lot of disappointed people.”
At Mt. Snow, Vt.—one of the ski resorts on Wachusett’s map—area operators did not hand out maps in the parking lot. Instead, they passed out flyers that urged skiers to take a long, hard look at the crowds already at the area before purchasing a lift ticket.
“We had too many people,” confessed Bruce McCloy, marketing manager. “It was the busiest weekend we’ve ever had by a mile. We couldn’t really handle the demand that weekend.”
Eight years after Martin Luther King Day became a national holiday, the combination of a three-day weekend, good snow, great weather and soaring consumer confidence, made for record crowds nearly everywhere around the country . With the noticeable exception of California, which had either too much rain (southern California) or too much snow (the Sierras), all regions seemed to share in the prosperity.
At Winter Park, Colo., the holiday even brought out those most fickle of all skiers—the front-range skiers. Boosted by enthusiastic Denverites who drove the 70 miles up from the city, Winter Park posted its biggest one-day and weekend totals of the season. The MLK day holiday has even gotten bigger at Winter Park than the traditionally strong President’s Day weekend.
“Last year we had 39,000 skiers over the President’s Day weekend and more than 40,000 for MLK,” said Robert Kunkel, marketing manager at Winter Park. “And this year MLK was up eight percent over last year. It’s becoming one of our biggest weekends of the year.”
At Snowshoe in West Virginia, the weekend has also become the season’s frontrunner—to the point where skiers this year didn’t want to go home.
“Saturday and Sunday’s numbers were actually down a little from last year, but Monday’s crowds were enough to give us the biggest three-day total in the history of the resort,” said Joe Stevens, Snowshoe’s public relations manager. “Instead of making that third day just a travel day like they used to in the past, people hung around and skied on Monday.”
Even in some midwest states, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, where the holiday is not universally celebrated, resort operators reported brisk business. “I can’t complain,” said Mark Tibbetts, general manager at Pine Knob, 30 minutes outside of Detroit. “Monday was mediocre, but we had a record for Saturday and Sunday—not bad considering that MLK has always been kind of a non-event around here.”
In Wisconsin, the fact that the holiday is also not universally celebrated did not stop Ted Motschman, general manager at Mt. LaCrosse, from adding the weekend to the area’s holiday pricing list for the first time. “We had been kind of dumb not to,” he said. “We had a good weekend.”
No one knows for sure why MLK took off this year—timely snow, weather, the holiday itself; it could even have been the economic recovery we’ve read so much about, or maybe there really is such a thing as “pent-up demand.” Whatever it was, everyone agreed that the well-timed holiday is having a growing impact on their own businesses and the industry in general.
“It’s always been much more acceptable for people to take a day off from work to go golfing than to take a day off to go skiing,” says Dennis Eshbaugh, general manager at Holiday Valley, N.Y. “We have really struggled giving people cause and a reason to take time off from work for snowskiing. But I think this midwinter holiday has helped alter this view.”
