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Reconfiguring the value equation

Giving people reasons to stay and excuses to return
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“Food is a great leveler, and if you’re sharing food, it generates a spontaneous intimacy.” - Marnie Simon

When Lynn Mathews arrived in Whistler in the fall of 1966 she was welcomed by the local postal/logging clerk as the 44 th year-round resident in a 10-mile radius. There was no “town” of Whistler. Highway 99 had just been paved to Creekside, the limited valley roads were dirt and the closest food store was in Squamish. What Whistler did have was tons of snow and the ski lifts were going into the first year of full operation.

Come summer of 1967, the snow and skiers had all left the valley and Mathews remembers thinking, “Where have I moved to? There’s no people, there’s just ski lifts, a daylodge, an empty parking lot and one gas station. And they’re building a chapel?!”

As the story goes, Franz Wilhelmsen, original planner of Whistler Mountain, was inspired by the little mountainside church where he’d skied as a boy in his native Norway, and envisioned such a chapel for Whistler.

This first stage of Whistler’s development, which was completed in the fall of 1965, had included a four-person gondola to midstation, a double chair, two T-bars, and a warming hut.

At this time, the ski hill vision required immense amounts of infrastructure to grow the dream, including commercial accommodation, restaurants, sewer stations, paving… all of which, one would think, would have taken precedence over a chapel.

But Whistler’s first skiers were mostly day-trippers — enthusiastic Vancouverites who had for years been obliged to head States-side or to Europe to get their skiing fix. They’d come by train on the weekend. And if they were accustomed to attending church on Sunday, as about 4 in 10 Canadians were at that time, they’d head home again Saturday night. If they could attend a service in North America’s first ecumenical chapel on Sunday morning at the base of Whistler, then click into their skis and head straight up the gondola — well, Franz had just given them a reason to stay. An excuse to linger. By meeting their deepest needs.

"December 1967 had horrendous snowfall,” remembers Mathews, “and on Christmas Eve, members of the Chapel Committee had shoveled a path to the recently completed Skiers Chapel and lined the pathway with candles in brown paper bag lanterns. And, when I stood there that Christmas Eve watching people heading up the candle lit pathway, towards the chapel with its beautiful stained glass window, I thought, ‘Of course. It makes perfect sense to have a chapel here.’”

Giving people reasons to stay is how Whistler began.

And if Mission Accomplished is measured by its growth rate, Whistler was a phenomenal success.

In 40 years, the community’s permanent population grew from 50 to approximately 10,000.

And the visitors were just as impressed. From 87,000 skier visits in 1968-69, to 1.7 million in 1995-96, Whistler was posting an average annual growth rate of over 11 per cent.

For the next decade, skier visits consistently topped 2 million.

But the 2001-02 spike at 2.23 million was a high-point that hasn’t been duplicated since.

For the first time in 40 years, Whistler’s skier visits had flat-lined. And although a host of external factors filled the dock, the tally raised a more pointed question about guilt and innocence.

Had we done something wrong?

• • •

When I showed up in Whistler in November 1994 wearing a sheepskin coat and a Mick Dundee accent, my mother still believed I was on my way to becoming Australia’s first female Prime Minister.

That fantasy suffered a rapid death-spiral with a series of university deferments, working visas and ski resort jobs.

I’m sure Mum’s still proud of me, although she doesn’t brag about my dumpster diving phase in the same way she would have boasted about a Rhodes scholarship.

Regardless, these are my accomplishments: I lived a ski bum life from the time I was 19 and I never called home for rent money; at 25 I hit the road for a summer and lived out of a 1987 Toyota Tercel on $500. Even living on fresh air and leftovers, I could see that my life was richer than that of my professional-salaried friends, that their grass wasn’t greener at all, it was simply Astroturf...

Every hot shower I took after that summer on the road was a luxury, a marvel of social engineering and first world decadence. The sound of rain on the roof still makes me grateful that I have a roof. The first place I visit, whatever town I’m in, is the public library.

The dirtbag ways are hard to shake. (Although the dumpster diving was easier to leave behind.)

The spirit of a community resides primarily in its public spaces and buildings. The public buildings are the Rosetta Stone — immediately decoding the personality of the place, its sacred amulets and secret lore. Public buildings are where democracy plays its true hand — dealing out a Royal Flush regardless of a person’s income level, education, residential square footage, clothing labels. The commons, the public park with picnic shelters and cook-spaces, the library with its Internet access, newspapers, trove of books, and deep-bellied reading chairs, the community art gallery… in these places we are equals. In these places we can seek refuge from the tent, the sulky weather, the 12 other nerve-jangling housemates, the empty wallet.

If Mission Accomplished is measured by the square footage of free-to-access public space, then Whistler in the winter is a sorry failure.

Summer days are different. Lakes, trails, beaches, docks. The play fort outside Blenz that is crawling with kids and dogs and latte-quaffing caregivers. The front deck of VANOC’s Information Centre. Artwalks. Farmer’s markets. The patios. The skate park. LUNA’s outdoor movies, and Loonie Rides.

But as the weather closes in, 4,500 freshly arrived seasonal workers funnel towards dry places, where they can hang out until work starts without burning through their meager savings. And where can they go? 550 people a day head into the library’s 3,000 sq. ft. trailer, twice as many people as seen in other libraries across the province.

They seek out Internet access, linger in cafes, nurse cooling coffees and warming beers for as long as is humanly possible, squat surreptitiously in hotel lobbies reading pilfered newspapers.

And they wait for the bars to open.

After all, where else is there for them to go?

Somewhere during Whistler’s boom years of ascending skier visits, construction cranes and swag-hauls of accolades, we lost sight of that initial vision. We were no longer building excuses for people to linger. We had become McResort — looking simply to maximize patron turnover, maximize bling, and maximize profits.

The formula was pretty simple. The average winter visitor spends $648 a day. The more of them we process, the richer we get. They outnumber the resident 1.5 to 1. They outnumber the transient worker 3 to 1. They swell our daily population to 31,351. They are the market we design our buildings, our ski runs, our high-speed chairlifts and our businesses for.

Whistler became geared towards forcing people to spend money. Roving timeshare sales agents even approached guests as they strolled through town.

Visitors started saying, Whistler isn’t good value any more.

And transient workers started saying, We don’t feel welcome here.

They were the yin and yang of Whistler’s demise. We were failing to meet the mission at the heart of a resort business. We might have been making money. But we were harvesting unsustainably. It couldn’t last. We weren’t giving people reasons to stay. Or excuses to come back.

• • •

It was time to reconfigure the Value equation.

Value for money is what visitors rate as the most important element of their Whistler stay, and it’s consistently the lowest rated attribute in Tourism Whistler’s visitor surveys. In summer 2004, visitors were asked for their recommendations on how Whistler could better meet their expectations. Their top responses: reduced prices and more activities for children and families.

The resort was already taking a beating in its visitor numbers — it didn’t need to be whacked on the head any harder. We started to take notice. We rallied. Monitored. Developed Comprehensive Sustainability Plans, Taskforces and Strategic Priorities.

At the top of the list: improve Value.

From the Whistler 2020 Visitor Experience Strategy, to Tourism Whistler’s 2007 priorities, there’s a new formula in town. We’ve scribbled over the old one: tourists equal money. And replaced it with something a little more nuanced: Value = Service + Product + Price.

And the people in the engine room of the community have been rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

• • •

In 2002, Jill Ackhurst was Chair of Whistler Community Services. With a background in community planning and health and a passion for service, she’s since been called the right person in the right place at the right time to draw attention to the fact that Whistler’s young transient workers did not feel welcomed by the community.

That outcast mentality had a ripple effect throughout Whistler — breeding bar-room brawls and excessive drug and alcohol consumption. The kids were homesick, they had barely any money or they lacked the experience to know how to manage their money. They had no spaces to claim except the bars.

Ackhurst could see that each seasons’ temporary workers were our first wave of winter visitors, breaking along our shores in anticipation of the real swell. They were guests here, too, though they were never treated that way, and within a month of arriving, they would become the first impression most visitors had of Whistler.

The solution Ackhurst spearheaded was to throw out the Welcome mat to the seasonal resident. A spate of grassroots initiatives bloomed, from LUNA’s innovative social programming to the jam-packed Welcome Week culminating in the Jill Ackhurst Memorial Dinner, named for her after her untimely death from cancer. The initiatives kept growing, from the recent Shoestring Project to the Seniors Nutrition “MASH” project.

In short, people started creating virtual chapels… literal gathering places of community to meet the deeper needs of Whistler’s transients. Helping them through their first season — by providing them with a reason to stay.

“The Welcome Dinner is so successful,” says chair of the Whistler Health Care Foundation, and dynamic community leader Marnie Simon. “Food is a great leveler, and if you’re sharing food, it generates a spontaneous intimacy.”

Through her volunteer work on the Community Advisory Committee for Seniors to Vancouver Coast Health, Simon spearheaded a project that would see Whistler seniors embark on an “Intergenerational Interaction” project with food at its heart.

Every week throughout the fall, a team of two seniors heads off to the Community Services’ emergency accommodation lodge to prepare a home-cooked meal for the residents. The housing offers a temporary reprieve for a crew of young Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and Brits, who are waiting for staff housing to open up, to secure jobs, and find a place to bunk for the winter. The seniors descend like white knights, bearing armloads of fresh groceries, and conduct a team of willing sous-chefs in the kitchen.

“We don’t make them help us,” laughs Simon, “but they’re usually pretty keen. And that was the whole idea, to get them involved in making good nutrition choices, without giving them a lecture. We sit down and eat together, and then after supper, they do the dishes, which is nice, and we prepare a second meal for them for later. We spend about four hours together, which is perfect, because what we had wanted to do from the outset is to break down the ageism barriers that go both ways.”

Instead of the Fusty Old Fogies and the Foolish Young Turks scowling at each other from a distance, the project enables seniors to get a shot of the elixir of youth and the kids to get a dose of TLC and worldly wisdom, all over a good feed.

The project’s finale will be a Christmas feast, in conjunction with LUNA, targeted particularly to the seasonal workers who aren’t in staff housing. They make up the one-third of seasonal residents who are paying more than 40 per cent of their gross income on housing. That doesn’t leave much money for turkey.

Whistler’s Darwinism (“If you can’t cut it on your own, then you don’t deserve to stay in Whistler”), seems, thankfully, to be in decline. “I’m hopeful that these kinds of initiatives will change the tide,” says Simon. The problem of excessively high rents, fuelled by astral taxes and damage bills for property owners, “is too big to tackle head on. We need to go at it sideways. And I think that starts with building relationships.”

• • •

Having Marnie Simon cook you dinner doesn’t fit the Price plus Product plus Service equation. But it’s still about Value.

Getting value. And being valued. And they’re related, according to Dennis Marriott, the general manager of Millennium Place.

Marriott is the Big Daddy of the Value Game — at last month’s Harry Manx and Michael Kaeshammer concert, which launched MY Place’s Canadian Series, he surprised the audience with champagne floats and hors d’oeuvres at intermission. He brought in draft beer for the B-grade Horrorfest screening, and after MY Place’s most recent art show, patrons who came to collect their purchases found complimentary concert tickets packaged up with their art.

The reactions were awesome.

But then, Marriott knew they would be. He clearly gets a buzz from coming up with ways to surprise people, to surpass their expectations. “If you think it’s a lot of work, then you’re in the wrong business. Go be an actuary.”

But if you care genuinely about people, he says, you’re refueled and recharged by their reactions. And that personal relationship is at the heart of the Value formula.

“Value is not a simple thing,” Marriott says.

Price is just one of the components, and so is the cost of accessing the product. “A cappuccino that’s half as expensive as it is next door, but requires you to climb two sets of stairs, go through a retail maze, and line up for 20 minutes wouldn’t be as good value even if it was free.”

Value also involves the quality of experience — the tactile, emotive, sensory factors. And, ultimately, value depends on whether what was delivered matched up with what was expected.

“The solution of dropping the price so the value goes up is the least effective approach,” he says. “We don’t set value. They do.”

The guest comes with an expectation — some fantasy of what their ski holiday will be, based on a friend’s stories, a 20-year-old memory, a magazine spread. It’s a promise. What shapes their sense of value of the experience is whether the reality matches up with that promise.

“Value is really about making it personal,” says Marriott, and he rhymes off a string of experiences that represent Whistler’s best value, the things that really blow people away: having Doug Forseth strike up a conversation with you as he busses your table in the Roundhouse. It’s your ski instructor shooting the breeze with you the entire chairlift ride so you forget to feel afraid. The chocolate bar handed to you by a grinning Mountain Host when you head to the hut to ask for a trail-map. It’s the fire spinners and big air huckers lighting up the night at the Fire and Ice show. It’s the way your daytimer fills up over the film festival, or Christmas, or during Celebration 2010, or the World Ski and Snowboard Festival. It’s the liftie singing you a goofy song, or randomly offering the “word of the day.” It’s the restaurant manager bringing crackers and crayons to your kids, spontaneously, giving you five minutes of peace to look through the menu yourself.

“It’s simple, simple stuff. But it gives people a moment. Makes it personal. And now they’re invested. It’s become their resort. Not just ours.”

• • •

There’s a shift that happens when the seasonal worker decides to come back for another winter, or decides to stay on through the summer. When the visitor flies home with a dream of retiring, selling up and moving to Whistler to spend their dotage. When the Saturday skier says, you know, we could just go to church here in the morning, and get another day of skiing in…

They’ve become part of our community.

They’ve become part of our success.

Sidebar:

A Dirtbag Guide to Whistler

There are almost no public spaces in Whistler that get you out of the weather without requiring a cash outlay. MY Place has a great art gallery, with a meditation room for when you need a quiet moment, and a few chairs around the fireplace on the mezzanine. When events are not programmed, you can chill here.

The library is an in-demand service, usually packed, with a new building under construction that cannot be finished too soon.

Start your own gathering: potlucks, book clubs, movie nights around whoever scooped the TV from the Re-Use It Centre.

For a change of scenery, hop the bus to Pemberton or Squamish, and check out their libraries and thrift stores, which don’t get picked over as thoroughly.

Your four most important possessions will be: a season pass, a gym pass, a WAVE pass and a library card. Acquiring these is your November mission.

Follow the chicken wings for cheap eats. Remember tight-ass Tuesdays at the cinema.

Volunteer. It’s the only way to get access to events that you could never afford to pay for, like the Whistler Film Festival, Cornucupia, the World Ski and Snowboard Festival.

Join LUNA.

Scam a free Globe and Mail at Whistler-Blackcomb’s restaurants. Run speed Sudoko competitions.

Skate at the Creekside underground parking lot.

Be creative.

Ask for help.

And look after each other.



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