The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
RTA tells CBMR to stop blaming them
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. At least that’s the economic trend at many ski areas and resort towns across the state. Some of the key numbers are in for the ski season—sales tax, skier visits, taxable sales—and for the most part they’re all down from past years. That’s certainly the case in Mt. Crested Butte, and they’re not alone.
Yet the National Ski Areas Association in Lakewood, Colo. just recently announced that the U.S. Ski Industry had its second best season on record, with 59.7 million visits in 2009/10. According to the NSAA news release, “The Rocky Mountain region continued its dominant overall position in terms of total visitation, increasing by 3.4 percent over last year, and again exceeding the 20-million visit threshold.”
Where did they all go?
Crested Butte Mountain Resort reports total skier visits down about 5 percent this year compared to last season, from 359,000 to 342,000. That number includes season pass holders, comp passes and associate passes, in addition to day tickets. Actual paid skier days for the same period, which more accurately reflect the number of visitors and tourists in town, were not released by CBMR.
Daren Cole, CBMR’s vice president for sales and marketing, offered this analysis of the 5 percent decline in skier visits. “I can directly attribute the loss [in skier visits] to the loss in numbers of destination skiers,” he said. Cole said a decline in both airline seats available and the number of passengers coming in contributed to the decline in skier visits. “Year over year we had 10,000 fewer seats coming into the market, and that equated out to 5,000 fewer passengers for this year,” said Cole.
“If a better flight schedule fills to 70 percent load factor, we would have 5,000 incremental passengers next year. The total number of seats is going to be a moving target over the next few years as we build the RTA [Gunnison Valley Rural Transit Authority] reserve back up.”
RTA chairperson Jonathan Houck responded to Cole’s assertions that the air service levels were the primary culprit in the decline in skier visits.
“I struggle with CBMR pointing the finger at the air service levels as being the main reason that their skier visits are down. The RTA has delivered what CBMR has asked for in air service in each of the last four years that I have been an RTA board member. CBMR has chosen the cities and the size planes they have wanted. We, as a board, spend 2/3 of the RTA tax revenues on air service and have executed CBMR’s requests. In turn, we have spent down our fund balance by paying our share of the guarantees.
“The 10,000-seat difference has a little more history to it than Daren Cole chose to explain. In fact, there was a very good reason for the reduction. In the previous year, two airlines had to increase the size of their planes (at no cost to the community) and put 6,280 more seats than we expected into Gunnison. How can you blame those extra seats for the low load factors that year, and then blame them for less skier visits this year?”
The RTA board of directors will meet on Friday, May 14 at 8 a.m. in the County Commissioners’ room in Gunnison and airline configurations are likely to be discussed.
“Feeder” ski areas thrive in tough economy
Cole recently attended the National Ski Areas Association meeting in Orlando, Fla. where he heard from other resorts that faced similar challenges this past ski season. “The takeaway at NSAA was that destination resorts had more challenges, and were definitely down in destination guests. Ski areas near metropolitan areas fared better.”
Nearby Monarch Mountain represents that trend and then some. The ski area boasted a record 185,000 skier visits this season, citing its affordability and proximity to metropolitan areas like Colorado Springs (2.5 hours away) for its success. “It’s not just us—Sunlight near Glenwood and Powderhorn also had big years,” said Monarch’s Marketing Director Greg Ralph. “They are big [geographic] areas with smaller gems… the affordable versus the attainable.
“It’s good for the sport of skiing, because it shows the market isn’t going away,” he continued. “We’ll always be a feeder area and have a high percentage of beginners.”
Ralph laid out his perspective on how CBMR and Monarch relate: he equated Crested Butte Mountain to Jackson Hole, and Monarch to Grand Targhee. “We feed to the destination resorts; I can’t imagine as many people start at big areas. When you’re not a good skier or rider, how much terrain do you need? We’ll keep growing the sport, and hopefully some of the resorts like Crested Butte will see some bounce-back.”
Monarch’s closing week promotion, which allowed CBMR pass-holders to ski free all week long, generated 1,007 CBMR skier visits. Ralph said the Sidewinder Bar “looked like the Avalanche” during après. “We recouped the money at the bar alone!” Ralph said.
Statewide skier-visit stats for the 2009/10 season are coming soon. Jennifer Rudolph, Communications Director for Colorado Ski Country USA, which represents 22 Colorado ski resorts, said its member resorts’ final skier-visit stats will be released on June 10 at the CSCUSA meeting. She reported that visits were up slightly in the beginning of the season, and down slightly mid-season.
“We’ve heard that some resorts were very busy in the spring, and it will be interesting to see how the season ends up,” said Rudolph. “One of the things we did notice this year is that a lot of resorts stocked their calendar with events and deals this spring, to get people to keep coming up to the mountains, and enjoy the spring conditions and events.”
Suffering Sales
Skier visits are but one tool for assessing the financial success of the ski season, and its impact on corresponding resort towns. Sales tax and taxable sales numbers are another. During the May 11 town council meeting, Mt. Crested Butte’s first quarter sales tax numbers were revealed. The town is 12.3 percent below budget for the first quarter of 2010, but it’s important to note that they budgeted to be 5 percent down for the year. So essentially, town finance director Karl Trujillo said that they are down closer to 17 percent, and he projects they’ll see a deficit of approximately $106,000 through April. He also reported that taxable sales this March in Mt. Crested Butte were off almost a million dollars ($6,273,800 to $5,325,480) compared to 2009, or 15 percent below last year.
A report from the Colorado Association of Ski Towns provided some side-by-side analysis of taxable sales and sales tax. In Mt. Crested Butte, some of the numbers are staggering. Taxable sales in January 2007: $5,001,200. January 2010: $3,819,340. That’s a decline of 23.6 percent, or $1,181,860, and if you were to use the taxable sales in January 2008 ($5,541,089) instead, the decline is even more staggering.
The town of Crested Butte didn’t fare much better—taxable sales were down 21.6 percent in January of this year compared to January 2007, from $4,370,700 to $3,427,150. “Our sales tax shows close to a 20 percent decline in the first three months of this year compared to 2007 and that’s not the direction anyone wants to go,” said Crested Butte Finance Director Lois Rozman.
How did some of the other Colorado resort towns fare? Summit County’s decline in taxable sales comparing January 2007 to January 2010 trumps everyone. They are down nearly $10 million, from $32,386,750 in January ’07 to $22,744,700 in ’10. That’s a 29.8 percent decline.
During the same time period (January 2007 compared to January 2010), Steamboat’s taxable sales were down 13.8 percent, or roughly $7 million ($51,116,525 to $44,043,875).
Telluride was basically flat when comparing January 2007 taxable sales to January 2010—as a matter of fact they were up a whopping .1 percent, from $9,656,600 to $9,668,503.
