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Feature - Demographics finally favouring ski industry

Baby boomers hang on while echo boomers enter the snow sports

Among ski area managers across the United States a new jauntiness is evident. Times are looking better. After sputtering for two decades, the industry is finally growing once again.

For ski areas, it’s not just a matter of stealing market share from one another. The pie of customers has actually been getting bigger, the first time since baby boomers came of age 25 years ago.

Consider the last three years. There was terrorism, stock market pneumonia and war – not once, but twice. They should have spelled disaster for the ski industry. Instead, the U.S. ski industry had three of its four busiest seasons ever, the first prolonged growth since numbers began flattening in 1979.

Canadian ski areas show similar numbers. More than 18.5 million skier visits were recorded in Canada in each of the last three winters – an increase of nearly 1.2 million skier visits over the previous record.

A miracle? Not really. Population demographics have begun to favour the industry once again. The 78 million baby boomers, who are now aged 40 to 58, are lingering on the slopes longer than expected. They are more healthy and vigorous than any generation before, and the new shaped skis combined with improved grooming may keep them on boards 10 years longer than originally expected.

Echo boomers, aged 21 and younger, are now dancing onto centre stage, about 71 million strong, providing nearly as much demographic punch as the original boomers. If the ski industry can get this generation as interested in snow sports as their elders have been about skiing, the good times will roll.

Michael Berry, president of the Colorado-based National Ski Area Association, is already upbeat. He traces the surge to the 2000-2001 season. From the previous high of 54 million skiers in the United States that had been the benchmark for a decade, the national tally leaped to 57.3 million. Added to that were a record 18.5 million skiers in Canada.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., the near halt in long-distance travel, and the stock market skid, deflated skier numbers might well have been expected. Instead, they held at 54 million. Then, last season, despite the outbreak of war against Iraq during March, numbers jumped again – to a new record of 57.6 million. Canadian ski areas have totalled 18.9 million skier visits each of the last two winters.

Berry says he wouldn’t be surprised if U.S. skier numbers surpassed 60 million within the next few years.

"We would expect this growth to continue for five to 10 years – that’s what the demographic data are telling us," says Berry.

So far, nearly all the evidence for growth is found at smaller ski areas near cities. A third of the 735 ski areas that existed 20 years ago have now closed, most of them smaller places, often in places of marginal snow conditions. But now, the surviving small ski areas are thriving, and there are a few new ski areas.

Consider Colorado’s Eldora Mountain Resort. A smallish ski area located west of Boulder, Eldora a decade ago was doing about 135,000 skiers annually, all of them day visitors from Colorado’s Front Range. In the last several years it has been squeezed by cheap season pass prices offered by Vail Resorts and Intrawest at destination resorts not that much farther away.

Still, by last year Eldora’s numbers had essentially doubled, to nearly 290,000 skier days, nearly at the same level as Aspen Mountain.

Such increased business is common at small ski areas close to cities across the U.S., reports National Ski Areas Association’s Berry. They’re doing so well that at times – during school vacations, holidays, after-school programs – there’s a capacity problem.

And all of this, says Berry, is easily explained.

"It’s all attributable to the demographic reality that there are a lot of kids under 20," he says. "We expect to see this phenomenon continuing for between five and 10 years, and we have actually focused a lot of effort in the industry to make sure we take full advantage of this opportunity."

But Ford Frick, an economist and a principle in Denver-based BBC Research and Consulting, also argues that the industry may be growing because it has shaken loose of its stuffiness. In his industry-commissioned paper, The American Ski Industry — Alive, Well and Even Growing, he argues that snowboards have been the key agent of change.

"The introduction of snowboarding, and the rapid rise in telemark skiing, free skiing and a number of other equipment variations, have been a breakthrough for the ski industry – not just because they drew a new generation of participants, but because they reminded an increasingly stodgy industry that ‘skiing’ was fundamentally about unstructured, outdoor recreation and the individual freedom and adventure that it offers," says Frick.

The best demonstration for the ski industry’s greater flexibility has been at Aspen, which for the third year running in January hosted the Winter X Games.

With motorcycle riders doing flips, teen-aged females snowboarding across chasms of snow, and exuberant teen-aged boys smearing their bellies with paint, the X Games represent a visual feast, whether in person or on television. Nearly 50,000 people this year turned out for the four-day event. Television viewers have annually increased 20 per cent.

Compare that with World Cup skiing at Aspen – a couple thousand people in the flesh? Maybe, if it’s a nice day.

Nor is Aspen alone. Whistler-Blackcomb and the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival, Vail, Crested Butte, Breckenridge – just about wherever you go, the story is the same. Ski resorts are doing things unimaginable a few years ago in an attempt to hang onto baby boomers while reaching out for the new crowd of what might be called Xtylers or freestremers.

But do these new snowsports have mainstream appeal, the way that skiing did 30 to 40 years ago among coming-of-age baby boomers? When that happened, ski areas in Colorado posted annual gains of 10 to 20 per cent. Ski racing defined the times, and its greatest icon was Jean-Claude Killy, the French racer who dripped charisma and inspired movies. Skiing, the sport and the lifestyle, was defined as "cool" by arbiters of mass culture.

Today, you can get arguments both ways about whether snow sports will reach the same point in mass culture.

"Is it mainstream? I don’t know. I might say not yet," says David Perry, chief operating officer for the Aspen Skiing Co. "Mainstream? I’d almost say calling it that is the death knell. It hasn’t peaked yet, and it’s still very cool."

Jerry Jones, who worked in the ski industry from the late 1950s well into the 1990s, with stints from Sun Valley to Beaver Creek, says the coming-of-age generation needs a public figure of a Justin Timberlake visibility to push snow sports into the same currents of popular culture as skiing in the 1970s.

"I don’t see it in the mainstream," he says.

Jim Spring, who tracks the ski, golf, and tennis industries at his Boulder-based Leisure Trends, says youngsters today may be more fickle than might be inferred from the rousing success of the X Games.

"Essentially, the ski industry is being sustained by baby boomers, and it’s not just here in the Rocky Mountains," he says. "The actual numbers as a percentage of 16- to 24-year-olds is declining, and it has been declining as a percentage of the total skier population for the last 10 years."

In other words, says Spring, the pipeline isn’t filling up rapidly enough at the bottom end to sustain growth once baby boomers begin to drift from the sport in greater numbers.

But the ski industry has another major challenge. If it is to grow, it must broaden its appeal to a population that is culturally and racially becoming steadily more diverse.

In 1970, mid-way through the ski industry’s last boom, non-Hispanic whites made up 83 per cent of the U.S. population. At the century’s turn it was 69 per cent. By mid-century, says the U.S. Census Bureau, it will be 50 per cent.

In the next 45 years, the Asian population is expected to triple. But by far the largest minority group in the United States will be Hispanics, at about 25 per cent of the population.

With such evidence in hand, Roberto Moreno, a Denver-based activist and former ski patroller and instructor in Colorado’s Summit County, says the ski industry must reach out to minorities.

"If we don’t, we will turn snow sports into polo," says Moreno.

"Last year’s jump to 57 million skier visits nationally was an anomaly, and more the result of the proliferation of discount season passes," he maintains. "In fact, the actual number of snow riders in America is decreasing. What isn’t an anomaly is this country’s growing multicultural and gay population."

The ski industry, charges Moreno, has been only too successful at marketing its exclusivity. It’s now time to become inclusive, he insists.

Concurring with Moreno’s assessment is Rick Kahl, editor of Ski Area Management. Golfing, the very epitome of country club exclusivity, has much higher participation among minorities than skiing, he says.

When asked to talk about how to recruit minorities to skiing, many people of varied backgrounds use the same words as if speaking from a script. The industry, they say, must make the "invitation."

Extending this hand to minority groups is not easy, say those who market skiing, but neither is it rocket science. Mostly, it’s hard work. The hand shake requires work by both ski area operators and minorities.

Here and there are success stories. Aspen’s Perry recalls that when he was at Whistler he helped attract Chinese from Vancouver. The key was working with group tour operators, he says, and then accommodating the entire families, even if only the youngsters were learning to ski and snowboard.

In California, Booth Creek’s marketing director, Julie Mauer, reports a parallel program that has delivered Asian-Americans to Northstar-at-Tahoe and Sierra. Studying California demographic trends in the mid-1990s, Mauer noticed the rapidly increasing number of immigrants from Asia among the Bay Area’s 11 million residents. Even more important, they had two key characteristics of traditional skiers: they were highly educated and relatively affluent.

Through targeted events, such as celebration of the Chinese New Year, and target groups like the social clubs that cater to Asian-Americans, Mauer has increased the number of young Asian-American professionals, called yappies, at the Tahoe resorts. From 2 or 3 per cent a decade ago, Asian-Americans now are 15 per cent of the customers at Northstar and Sierra.

Asian-Americans were "not a particularly hard sell," says Mauer. "It’s just a matter of reaching out to them. It’s not any harder than reaching out to Caucasians."

Latinos, say marketing executives, are a more complex puzzle. Moreno, now a consultant in such matters, advises the same approach as with those who have succeeded by working with Asian-Americans. The ski industry, he says, should establish ties through existing social and professional groups, "inviting" them to specific ski areas and into the sport in general. Affluence and education levels, note Hispanic activists, are both rising.

But Moreno also argues for more diversity among the work force at ski areas. Imagine going to a resort if you were white and everybody else was black or Hispanic, urges Moreno. You would, at the very least, probably feel uncomfortable. Yet there are almost no minorities in front-line positions at ski areas. Too, in marketing, such as Web sites, minorities are almost non-existent.

He is, reports Moreno, hearing some things from ski executives that please him.

Meanwhile, at Colorado’s largest destination resorts, optimism rules. In Aspen, where there has been no growth at ski areas since 1992, the Aspen Skiing Co.’s David Perry now predicts growth for five to 10 years.

At Vail Resorts, the story is the same. Adam Aron, chief executive officer, says he’s far less worried about competition from new resorts in British Columbia than about nearby competitors in Colorado with their on-mountain improvements, expanding bed bases and new base villages. Even so, his conclusion is the same. "We’re bullish," he says.

David Barry, senior vice president of Intrawest Colorado, which operates Copper Mountain and Winter Park, is also upbeat after double-digit gains in destination visitors this year. "There are going to be shifts and changes, but I believe that the sport is healthy, and the sport is evolving and the future is bright."



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