This 10K was filed a couple of weeks ago for the year ended July 31. There are about 760 ski areas in North America. Vail owns five major ones that accounted for 7.7% of skier visits (about six million) during the last season. We don’t get many chances to see individual data from many of them, so taking a look at this is worthwhile. It’s particularly interesting, in our current economic circumstances, to see More…
Posts Tagged ‘Winter Resorts’
Vail’s Annual Report; What’s the Future of Resort Real Estate?
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010Vail 2nd Quarter Results- Watching Real Estate Will Be Interesting
Thursday, April 15th, 2010Given that Vail says the snow up to about Christmas was the worst in 30 years, you have to say that they really did okay. But I think the most interesting thing in the whole 10Q was the disclosure that 13 holders of contracts to purchase Ritz-Carlton Residences had sued to get out of the contracts and get their deposits back because of a disputed delivery date. If you really wanted More…
Resort Retention and Occam’s Razor; Keeping it simple makes a lot of sense.
Wednesday, October 23rd, 2002William of Occam was a Fourteenth century logician and Franciscan friar born in the English village of Ockham and, yes, somehow I’m going to get this back to snowboarding without claiming that he invented the first one. He’s the author of what’s become known as Occam’s Razor. It states, in its original form, "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." It’s been massaged and interpreted to mean that when you have multiple More…
A Good Snow Year Does Not Make Us Heroes of Management; A Minor Reality Check
Tuesday, August 7th, 20011980- Michael Porter, the Harvard strategy Guru published Competitive Strategy. In it, he discusses how industries change, and how companies have to change, as they transition from growth to maturity. I want to look briefly at what Porter says stereotypically happens during this transition and see how it applies to the winter resort business. Like all industries, this one has become insular- we talk to each other too much. Yet basically, we More…
I Think I See a Plan. News From the Ski Industry Summit
Thursday, December 7th, 2000Okay, what was I doing at the Ski Industry Summit (formerly known as Ski Week) and why am I writing about it for Snow Biz? Anybody got a problem with some early season turns in Vail when there’s hardly anybody here? Didn’t think so. Also, there was an open bar each night. But aside from the obvious hedonistic reasons to show, the winter resort business has to do some things differently. Baby More…
News from the North; Lessons for the Snowboard Industry from Canadian Resorts
Saturday, August 1st, 1998Last April, I headed to Tremblant for the Canadian Ski Council’s annual symposium on the state of the Canadian resort industry. Naturally, my naïve anticipation of great snowboarding had nothing to do with my decision to go. Groomed hardpack with mud and rocks sticking through on narrow runs wasn’t what I’d expected. Thanks El Nino. At least it motivated me to go to most of the seminars and presentations. Nor did I miss a More…
Winter Resorts and Snowboarding; Why Does It Seem Like an Arranged Marriage?
Tuesday, July 1st, 1997The Medici family of Italy rose to commercial prominence during the renaissance at least partly because of their ability to make or receive payments in widely dispersed geographic locations. Lacking a wire transfer system, they arranged marriages between family members and other prominent merchants in commercial centers that gave them the ability to move money or goods through somebody they could trust. There was no love lost, but the commercial opportunities were More…
