Downhill distancing
Operators shrug off snow washout, look to bigger days ahead
Meltdown hasn’t dampened ski resorts’ outlook.
People in the ski industry tend to be optimistic by nature so it was no surprise that they saw the torrential rains a few weeks ago – which washed away much of a record snowfall – as a backhanded blessing.
After all, what better time for a weather washout than during a global pandemic that would have limited crowds even during the snowiest of winters?
With limitations on indoor and outdoor gatherings due to the COVID -19 pandemic, crowds during the crucial Christmas-to-new Year’s week would have been below normal any way, so it was as good a time as any to deal with poor weather.
Christmas week, Martin Luther King Day weekend, and the week of Presidents Day are when ski areas count on the crowds to put them in the black for the winter.
Even so, resort operators and ancillary businesses on Monday were saying last week
wasn’t as bad as they feared, with visits and revenue holding up better than the snow in some cases.
Business was especially good at New York state resorts due to various quarantines in places like Vermont and Massachusetts and the difficulty of traveling to western resorts. Those factors appeared to keep a lot of skiers and snowboarders close to home.
“New York is faring better than most states,” said Scott Brandi, president of the Ski Areas of New York trade group.
Resorts in New York and elsewhere are capping attendance, often requiring advance reservations to keep crowding to a minimum.
Despite that, Brandi said, “All of the areas large and small have been at capacity,” even though that may be 50 percent of the crowds in a normal year.
With fewer crowds expected all year, resorts have also had to hire fewer seasonal workers, which has saved them money. And they have largely halted the employment of South American visitors, often on school breaks, to work as lift
operators, restaurant servers and ski instructors.
While some restaurants and lodges were closed, those that were open seemed to be getting a steady flow of customers, said Gina Mintzer, executive director of the Lake George Regional Chamber of Commerce.
“They definitely saw the uptick of people coming in with their lift tickets on their jackets,” Mintzer said of what local restaurateurs told her of Christmas week.
Lake George is relatively close to both the West Mountain and state-run Gore ski areas.
The town is also close to the Vermont border and travel to the Green Mountain State has been limited, at least officially, by a two-week quarantine that visitors from New York are supposed to undergo before coming in.
That has impacted the tourism-dependent state, with early predictions calling for declines of anywhere between 40 percent and 70 percent this season.
One bright spot in that quarantine rule is that many New Yorkers have been working from home during the pandemic. That means they have been able to quarantine themselves
before traveling, said Adam White, spokesman for the Vermont Ski Areas Association.
“Business has been down but we have seen skiers and riders,” he said.
The need for reservations and social distancing has also changed the way both resorts and facilities like restaurants operate, observed both Mintzer and White.
Lake George restaurants report people going to their facilities and maybe sitting outdoors, which they view as safer than gathering in someone’s home, she said.
And some Vermont watering holes are having virtual après ski parties on Facebook with concerts on You Tube.
The push toward traceable, touchless skiing is also moving forward, said White.
The Smugglers Notch resort in northern Vermont is using RFID chip readers to track not just who gets on the chairlifts, but who comes in the lodge – which can facilitate contact tracing in the event of an outbreak.
“This situation,” he said, “Is going to move technology in the ski industry forward.”
Investors have been hoping that vaccines will allow daily life around the world to slowly return to normal. That’s helped spark a recent recovery for stocks of travel-related businesses, smaller companies and other industries left behind for much of the pandemic.
Still, rising coronavirus cases, the emergence of a mutant variant of the virus and concerns that the rollout of the vaccine isn’t happening fast enough are keeping investors on edge, said Adam Taback, chief investment officer for Wells Fargo Private Bank.
“The (virus), the severity of the impact it’s going to have during the winter, is still weighing on people’s minds,” Taback said.