KILLINGTON — Skier visits jumped at resorts in Vermont this past season to 3.9 million statewide, a roughly 21 percent increase over a previous season hampered by dismal snowfall, the Vermont Ski Areas Association announced Thursday.
Parker Riehle, the association’s president, described the past season using terms like “rebound,” “bounce back” and “comeback,” but said it was still short of the record 4.7 million skier visits two seasons ago.
“This past year we had some really good snowstorms,” Riehle said, “but we did have some of those thaw-freeze weather cycles.”
Riehle revealed the skier visit total Thursday to about 250 people involved in the industry at the association’s 48th annual meeting at the Killington Grand Hotel.
The 2015-2016 season skier visit total was 3.2 million, a low number compared with previous years. The drop was mainly attributed to a lack of snowfall across Vermont and the Northeast. The season before that, 2014-15, set a record with 4.7 million skier visits. In the 2013-14 season, 4.5 million skiers visited.
“Two years ago, that record year, the snowfall was much more cooperative than this past year,” Riehle said. “We really hit all the markers in that year.”
He estimated that out-of-staters account for about 80 percent of the skier visits.
Skier visit totals this year, Riehle added, are more accurate than in the past. That’s because new technology and scanners used at resorts do a better job tracking visits by pass holders.
In the past, he said, those numbers were often estimates, calculated using a multiplier of 20 to 25 visits per pass. Now, he said, resorts can better track how many times pass holders hit the slopes.
“It’s a lot more accurate, but it does bring the numbers down,” Riehle said.
Nationally, skiers visits also had a bit of a bounce-back year, up about 3.7 percent to 54.7 million this past season, compared with 52.8 million the previous one, according to the National Ski Areas Association.
In Vermont, the ski association collects skier visit figures from the resorts in the state. However, it doesn’t provide a resort-by-resort breakdown, saying such information is “proprietary.”
Killington resort records the greatest number of annual skier visits in the state.
This year, according Mike Solimano, Killington’s CEO and president, the resort saw skier visits up 37 percent from last year, and down 8 percent from two years ago.
“Our overall revenue,” he said, “outpaced our skier visit increases this year as our summer investments and other ancillary revenues continue to grow, so it was actually our best revenue year ever.”
Solimano credited a World Cup women’s ski competition hosted at the resort as part of the reason for Killington leading in skier visits. The two-day event, held over Thanksgiving weekend, drew about 16,000 spectators Saturday and 14,000 Sunday.
It was the first World Cup ski race in New England in 25 years, and the first in Vermont since 1978 at Stratton. Killington will be home to the event for the next two years.
In addition to talking about skier visits, Riehle recognized recent changes in ownership at three Vermont resorts. Vail Resorts bought Stowe Mountain Resort; Aspen Skiing Co. is in the process of buying Stratton Mountain Resort; and local investors led by Ralph DesLauriers bought back Bolton Valley. DesLauriers and his father started the ski area in 1966, running it until 1997.
Michael Berry, president of the National Ski Areas Association, who plans to retire at year’s end, received an achievement award Thursday recognizing his 25 years leading the NSAA.
He said at the meeting that while nationally numbers are up for this past season and more ski areas in the country are more profitable than ever, challenges remain. Those include finding the employees to work at resorts, dealing with climate change, and converting “newbies,” or first-time skiers, into lifetime skiers.
Currently, Berry said, that conversion rate is only about 18 percent, leaving 82 percent of those first-time skiers as a big possible market.
He also offered some parting words to new managers at resorts, advising them to know and learn from the history of the industry, including the mistakes.
“We thought the industry had enough financial energy, quite honestly, to create a massive, generic, demand-building campaign,” Berry said, “built around the notion that if people only knew about ski and snowboarding they would take it up in droves.”
He added, “We talked about things like, ‘Ski it to believe it.’ We talked about how we were going to get people on the bandwagon and be part of something special.”
Now, he said, he expects growth to come from each unique resort building up its own customer base, which in turn, will boost numbers overall.
“Your existing customer is your portal to your next customers,” Berry said.
He cautioned that there is “no silver bullet,” or single answer, when it comes to attracting more skiers.
“It’s the experience that you create that will draw people to the sport, allowing them to fall in love with the sport forever,” he said. “Keep in mind, what we sell is magic.”
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Read the story on VTDigger here: Resorts ‘bounce back’ with 3.9 million skier visits, up 21 percent.