The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Colorado Ski Country lets resorts make the call
Releasing skier visits post-season is something of a spring rite of passage, the final wrap on the ski season. But amid concerns about privacy, marketing and business strategies, starting this spring, Colorado Ski Country USA changed its policy for publishing that data, and will no longer provide individual resort’s skier-visit data to the public.
They also removed historic visit records from their website. CSCUSA, a non-profit trade association representing 22 Colorado ski resorts, will still provide cumulative skier visits.
Ari Stiller-Schullman, public affairs manager for CSCUSA, said the organization is essentially following the direction provided by its members.
“At a recent meeting, some of our member ski areas questioned why we are in the practice of releasing every member resort’s skier visit information. No one had a convincing reason why it should be Ski Country’s role to release each individual resort’s numbers, so Ski Country decided to leave the decision of whether and when to release skier visit numbers up to each ski area itself. As the trade association representing 22 ski areas around the state, we will continue reporting how our member resorts are doing on the whole.”
Skier visits are but one indicator of a resort’s performance. Sales tax generated in ski towns and other resort revenue provide a deeper look at the overall economic impacts of skier visits.
Crested Butte Mountain Resort vice president for sales and marketing Daren Cole said as much. “As the ski industry has evolved into a business with many revenue centers, skier volume is only one of the indicators we look at when building our business plan and overall strategy. A balance needs to be achieved between yield and volume, which is also affected by length of stay, frequency of visits and mix of overnight and day visits. Skier days are simply a by-product of all those aspects including new and repeat visits and who makes up the skier day mix.
“The skier-day metric is more misleading than it is helpful in many cases,” Cole added. “It does not give a true indication of a ski resort’s overall performance.”
For 2008-2009 CSCUSA reported 6,793,498 skiers visits total for its 22 member resorts. That’s as detailed as it’s going to get when the cumulative numbers for 2009-10 and future years are released. For more information visit www.coloradoski.com.
