How does Vail Resorts delivers skiing

Yesterday, we brushed a picture representing the ideal mountain ski resort. Now, contrast this idealized picture with the one offered today by big conglomerates like Vail Resorts, that are promoting traffic jams, lift-lines, unmet expectations, terrible communication and there’s suddenly a huge disconnect. 

Their product has turned into a lackluster consumable commodity, not a special, uplifting experience as it should have. Skiing should be like an Apple or a Tesla branded thing. It should be an experience, not just a product or a service. 

Tesla and Apple product faults or flaws are largely erased by the superlative quality of the experience they are able to deliver. There absolutely no question that in products like in services, experience should be the shining element that overwhelms everything else.

Have I said that folks who run ski resorts should also understand their local culture, come from the mountains or at least live there, be passionate about skiing and not consumed by greed, corporate schemes and tactics. Vail Resorts stands as the perfect example of what not to do in that area. 

With its approach, the quality of the experience is erased by a tsunami of misery coming from all sides, like over-flooding its slopes with skiers, creating excess traffic, poor service, lack of communication and irresponsible decisions. 

There are lots of areas where economies of scale from a slow, inflexible cookie-cutter made website, to a proprietary pass scanning system, or too many old and inefficient lifts like those still found in Park City are hampering Vail Resorts productivity and responsiveness. 

These regimented economies of scale are hurting a company’s flexibility and tying the hands of its local management. It seems that Alterra was more sensitive in keeping the traits of each one of its resort more distinctive in not blending them uniformly together. 

From an outside and cynical observer standpoint, it would even seem that Vail Resorts’ management is now squeezing its product every which way, as soon as possible, to produce more dollars, just before global warming makes it business model fully irrelevant…