Bill Jensen, Chief Operating Officer, Vail
There is always a wistful glimmer of hope that some idea, concept or change will revolutionize skiing (and snowboarding) with instantaneous results. The reality is that our sports and associated activities have consistently produced myriad evolutionary advances, with few truly blockbuster changes.
Over the next five years, evolution will again win out—and that’s a good thing. Evolutionary change has brought about significant improvements that have increased both enjoyment and participation. It has been a long time for most ski areas since we sold just a lift ticket; we have evolved into mountain resorts, offering both the promise and expectation for a complete vacation experience, whether by the day or the week. But the “complete” experience is a moving target. Ever increasing and sophisticated guest expectations will require expansion of the variety and level of guest services we offer. Evolution of guest services will impact the rest of the first decade of the 21st century in several ways:
Grooming will increase in importance, both to satisfy an aging Baby Boom generation and to meet the evolving expectations for terrain parks and features that fuel the energy of our future customer base, the Echo Boomers. Demand will require increased grooming of steep black diamond terrain as well as frequent grooming (more corduroy) of their favorite intermediate trails. Terrain features will become even more sculpted, creative, and themed, with multiple take off and landing choices.
Diverse on-mountain food choices will become the rule, not the exception, including table service dining. The hamburger and fries will remain a staple, but the influence of urban casual dining will become prevalent in the on-mountain mix. Look to the rapidly growing popularity of Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and other health-oriented specialty grocery/prepared food outlets as a business indicator.
Ski and board technology will continue to evolve, enhancing our guests’ ability and increasing demand for, and densities on, blue and black terrain. This in turn will require wider trails and expanded terrain and other enhancements.
Ski Schools will refine the learning process, recognizing that individuals learn and improve more effectively through different learning styles. This will boost retention rates and help the industry grow its customer base.
Resorts will grasp the significance and the potential of America’s growing ethnic diversity and refine their marketing strategies to target this rapidly growing demographic opportunity. People of color will propel the U.S. ski industry through the 60 million skier-day benchmark.
On-mountain communication with guests regarding lifts, trails, grooming, weather, and general messaging will expand, utilizing electronic technology, such as LCD-displayed web-based software and GPS oriented PDAs with integrated “you are here” trail maps, updated grooming and lift line status reports.
Cost-saving technologies will also evolve. Engineering improvements such as new-generation AC drives will reduce lift maintenance and energy costs. Improvements in lubricants and synthetic materials will significantly increase lift component reliability and operational longevity. Biometrics, a universal form of identification, will be introduced into ticketing technology, seriously limiting transferability of ticket products. This will result in increased ticket yields and overall profitability for resorts.
And, as guest expectations increase and resorts continue to refine the experience to meet those expectations, resorts will be able to increase the cost of a lift ticket.
Mark Danemann, President, Siriusware
In the past decade, we have seen tremendous advances in information technology. From complete PCs for less than $1,000 to hand-held wireless devices, advanced technology is becoming both affordable and available to a wide range of businesses and individuals. Ten years ago, few would have imagined the personal computer as the platform for our business operations; today, that is a reality even for small companies.
As the cost of technology decreases and its ease of use increases, more of a resort’s daily ticketing, point-of-sale and guest management operations will be accomplished with a single, centralized computer system. Most resorts have already established local area networks that encompass multiple buildings. The advent of inexpensive wireless technology will make communication with any location, including the middle of a ski run, affordable and more widely available.
The implementation of new technologies will no longer be limited to the largest resorts with the most capital to invest. Smaller areas can look forward to complete business solutions that accommodate all of their salespoint needs in a multitude of venues. These “enterprise solutions” will become very competitive with “best-of-breed” solutions, making it possible to put all of a resort’s sales operations on a single platform, with a single store of data. While these advances may not be as exciting as sending a picture via your cell phone, they will form the base for an ever-wider variety of functions and services.
The benefits of a single platform will touch every aspect of your business. These include lower costs, tighter management control and improved employee productivity. They will provide better management information, streamlined resource management and—best of all—an enhanced experience for your guests. Customers will have greater control over the information you maintain on them. They will have the capacity to log on to your website and edit their personal information. They will renew season passes or sign up for rentals and lessons before they arrive at the resort. They will pick up lift tickets at self-service kiosks and review their itinerary of activities on the television screen in their hotel room. Ski instructors will be notified via cell phone of changes to a guest’s meeting location, and a lift operator will tell a guest the last place their children hopped on a chairlift. Most importantly, since every salespoint will recognize each guest, transactions will be almost instantaneous. Customer service will take a giant leap forward.
Some large resorts have implemented these innovations already. In the near future they will spread to smaller sites. It is easy to focus on the implementation of a cool new breakthrough program at a single site with the resources and courage to experiment with new and exciting (read: risky) technologies, but what is more relevant is the impending proliferation of these technologies at even the smallest resorts.
Auden Schendler, Environmental Affairs Director, Aspen
Asking what’s on the environmental horizon is a bit like asking what’s for dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse in Denver. The beefy, obvious environmental issue facing skiing is climate change. The other, less obvious item high on the menu is intense and growing scrutiny of the industry by the public, shareholders, and environmental groups.
In the past six months, the pendulum has swung irrevocably toward action on global warming. In November, Russia ratified the Kyoto protocol, putting the treaty into effect. In August, the Bush administration released a new report indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only plausible explanation for global warming. This news was punctuated by a series of hurricanes that pummeled Florida—storms whose frequency and severity are predicted by climate models.
All this leaves many industries in flux. The insurance business is already facing huge weather-related claims; the energy sector will grudgingly accept a carbon-regulated world. The ski industry will use its power as a business lobbying force to protect the source of its profit: stable climate and (somewhat) predictable winters.
In the next five years, individual resorts, regional trade organizations, and national associations like NSAA will focus increasingly on climate. The ski industry will build upon the Keep Winter Cool campaign, its partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council, to raise awareness among skiers—a crucial grassroots step. More resorts will join the 70 that backed the McCain Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which will gain bipartisan passage in Congress.
The ski industry will help forge new, creative alliances that have impact out of proportion to its relatively small size. One example: the industry will partner in a climate change action plan within the historically conservative Colorado state government. Winter resorts will band with emerging business-oriented climate nonprofits, paying dues in the same way they contribute membership fees to trade associations.
The industry will disseminate two messages. First, that climate change is an economic, social, business and quality of life issue more than a strictly environmental one. Second, that addressing global warming in an aggressive way offers serious economic benefits—radical energy savings; safeguarding existing businesses, such as winter resorts; fostering new jobs; and creating new industries, such as wind farming.
Even so, scrutiny of our environmental performance will intensify. Shareholder activism will continue to grow.
Winter resorts will respond by adopting corporate emissions reduction policies, coupled with significant wind power purchases (greater than 1 percent of usage). Resorts will adopt rigorous green building policies and undertake cost-effective retrofits of boilers, compressors and lighting. The industry will embrace third-party certification of its environmental management programs, most likely through ISO 14001, which already has a foothold in the hospitality industry and is sweeping the national park service. Our example will inspire similar action by much larger industries, magnifying our impact.
Paul Mathews, President, Ecosign Mountain Planners
Three very significant trends in European resort and village development will likely appear in North America during the next five years: the ski circus, pedestrian villages, and the renovation of middle-aged resorts.
A very significant trend in Switzerland and Austria has been the connection of from two to five small- to medium-sized ski areas by cableways and slopes. The motivation for these projects is simple—survival. Many small and medium-sized ski areas fear they will “wither on the vine” in favor of larger, higher and more fully integrated ski stations. Many medium-size areas in North America will face similar pressures.
One telltale project will connect four ski areas and existing villages in central Switzerland, at Meiringen-Hasliberg-MelscheeFrutt and Titlis Engelberg. These areas will form one of the largest ski circuses in Europe, with more than 120 miles of slopes sprawling over 71 square miles. Longer, faster lifts, plus new snowmaking and snowgrooming technologies, have made this technically and economically feasible. The MHFT interconnect will require just six major lift installations at a cost of about $30 million, or $7.5 million per area.
In North America, the Utah Interconnect will eventually link seven ski areas— Snowbird, Alta, Solitude, Brighton, Deer Valley, Park City and The Canyons. Several other neighbors will at least consider links: Mammoth and June Mountain; Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows; even Squaw Valley and Northstar may be technically feasible. In Colorado, a connection of Vail and Beaver Creek will gain consideration, as will Vail and Copper Mountain. Stretch your imagination and Breckenridge could connect with Copper. Before you realize it, North America will have at least a couple of giant ski circuses that rival those of the Alps. But the biggest beneficiary is the environment, as roads, cars, energy consumption and pollution are replaced by electric-driven cableways and snowy slopes.
Village design will also evolve. The original villages at Vail, Whistler, Mont Tremblant and Sun Peaks in Canada were modeled after Europe’s Zermatt, Wengen, Lech and Zurs. Then European developers opted for large-scale, purpose-built resorts. Now, the human-scale village concept is being repatriated to Europe from North America. In the early 1990s, Ecosign overhauled the Village at Sierra Nevada, Spain, solving the resort’s internal traffic problems and improving pedestrian zones for a 4,000 bed village, which now overlays a four-story, 3,000-stall parking garage. Sierra Nevada has enjoyed tremendous success ever since. Similar, human-scaled renovations will soon transform Laax, Switzerland, Livigno, Italy, Arc 1950 at Les Arcs, France, and half a dozen resorts in Finland and Norway.
In North America as in Europe, many middle-aged purpose-built resorts (think of most high-rise French resorts and, to a degree, Copper Mountain and Lionshead at Vail) will be reborn, incorporating human-scale pedestrian zones and improved access to the slopes. Intrawest designer Eldon Beck will “reduce” the scale of the village at Copper Mountain while increasing the bed base. Vail Resorts’ plan to renovate and “reduce” the village at Lion’s Head will likewise succeed.
This renovation will not always be smooth; change rarely is. But the so-called “old” village at Whistler will be a case study in conflict. Some building owners are asking to take their three-and-one-half-story buildings up to five or six stories, while many residents (including me) believe that the current structures are tall enough. And in the next five years, this view will prevail.
Michael Jaquet, Founder, Freeze Magazine
Director of Business Development, CSTV (College Sports TV)
We are at war, we are hated by most countries around the world, and global warming looms on the horizon. Unless you work for Halliburton, things probably won’t get much rosier anytime soon. So why do I have such a positive view of the next five years of the industry?
The product that skiers and snowboarders experience now versus ten years ago is good reason to be positive about the future. New ski and snowboard technology, high-speed lifts, full-service lodges, improved grooming and the development of terrain parks have transformed the snowsliding product. Skiing and snowboarding offer a one-of-a-kind interaction with mountains and nature and adrenaline all at once. This will provide the most marketable sport/vacation/experience in the world (one that surely beats getting punched by Ron Artest).
So how will we strategically communicate these product benefits and customer experiences to the youth who are our future customers? By branding our resorts and experience through advertising, PR, and special events. Conveniently, there is (and will be) fully developed media to reach kids. The integration of the Internet and cable television will be complete over the next three years, and total adoption of these capabilities will quickly follow. In three years, the Internet is cable television and cable television is the Internet. Less than 10 years ago, consumers had 30 channels to choose from. In five years, they will have hundreds, perhaps thousands. That change has completely rewritten the business plans of every media company and will create niche media across every platform. Do you think that your potential customers will want to “read” your brochure on their television when so many other choices will exist? Your website will become its own combination broadband video website and television station.
This and other media options will give you a huge opportunity to deliver your brand to the target audience through a truly reality-based medium in a way that excites a potential customer like no 30-second spot or piece of paper ever will. And kids will be the early adopters. But vital to this strategy is defining your brand and selling your benefits to the targeted customer. You can only pull from a wide audience if each consumer feels you are speaking directly to them.
This isn’t as easy as placing insertion orders. Public relations and hosting special events and groups will grow in importance. The more people you can turn on to your brand and experience first-hand the better; experience will be the selling point in the next five years, as the virtual customer gets real. And no business sector has more of a party and event circuit than this industry.
Rick Spear, President, Leitner-Poma USA
With uphill/downhill capacity in balance at most resorts, lift development will focus on providing guests with more comfortable loading and unloading, less time on the lifts and more comfortable seats. To ease housing and employee shortages, lift efficiency will also mean replacing multiple older double chairlifts with a single high-speed quad or six-pack.
Lifts will also become more widespread as village transportation. The 8-place gondola in Telluride will be joined by many others as major North American resorts shift attention from on-mountain capacity to improving village traffic flows and parking. Parking lots and garages take up valuable village real estate; they will be moved further from the slopes and lifts will connect to the resorts. Shuttle buses are less expensive up front, but maintenance of the fleet, plus the resistance to leaving one’s automobile for another rubber tire mode of transportation, will make lift transportation popular with guests.
Quads and six-packs will remain the high-speed choice. North America will be very slow to match Europe’s acceptance of 8-passenger chairlifts because of the costs and because they give the perception that the trails will be crowded.
The trend toward ease of maintenance and lower maintenance costs will continue, along with the use of technology to maintain a high level of safety and reliability.
The Guest Editor Speaks
Our future promises ever-accelerating change. Organizations that have developed a true “change culture” will be best positioned to take advantage of the many opportunities coming our way. Within our organizations, teams that not only accept change but actively seek it out are some of our most valuable assets. Do we know who they are? Do we celebrate their successes? Do we graciously absorb their misses and encourage the next try? That’s what it takes to adapt to changing markets.
We need to focus our vision on the wider world as well. We all get the importance of attracting the youth market. Are we thinking hard enough about the ethnic diversity that exists in this segment? Today, we’ve got noodle bowls in our restaurants and hip hop in our parks. Forward thinkers are anticipating new learning styles, equipment needs and terrain expectations. But we must take our imaginations even further. What about these new boomers’ value systems? What will they want from us? Will they believe we’ve been good stewards of their environment? Will they bias toward large integrated resorts, even larger ski circuses, or smaller, more intimate experiences? How much will they expect us to know about them? (And how much is too much?) What might their work ethic and attitudes toward money and value be?
The Echo Boomers have more information than any group before them. Because of that, their expectations and standards will be very high, not just in product and service quality, but perhaps even more importantly, on a social responsibility scale. They will know if we are good employers. They will know if we are good stewards of the land and how energy-conscious we are. They will know how much we reinvest and give to worthy causes. They will know if we are providing good value. They will know, and they will care and make decisions about us accordingly.
—Lucy Kay
