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A Comedy of Errors: Part I

The municipality, not content with making sure toilets flush, potholes get filled and everybody lives sustainably everafter, has scanned the landscape, found a suitable windmill to tilt at, donned its armour, mounted its trusty steed and galloped at
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The municipality, not content with making sure toilets flush, potholes get filled and everybody lives sustainably everafter, has scanned the landscape, found a suitable windmill to tilt at, donned its armour, mounted its trusty steed and galloped at breakneck speed towards tackling the thorny issue of Front Desk Confusion in Tiny Town. For those of you who live here but have at best a tangential relationship with Front Desk Confusion, let me explain.

Happy Tourists, traveling en famille, arrive in Whistler, having booked a skookum lodging deal on the Internet. They step into a building that, for all outward appearances, looks like a hotel. There's a lobby, a front desk, a pool and hot tub, people coming and going and a grand entrance where the bus dropped them and their many, many bags.

Sauntering up to the front desk, Happy Tourist says to the front desk person, "Hi I have a reservation, the name is Smith." Front desk person checks the day's guest list and says, "Not with us you don't." Or words to that effect.

Puzzled and confused, Happy Tourist asks, "Isn't this the Powder Puppy Lodge?"

Front desk person, showing a mix of peeve and empathy, having been down this road before, says, "Yup. What room are you staying in?"

"105," answers Happy Tourist.

"Oh," says the now indifferent FDP, "That's not one of our rooms."

"There's no room 105?"

"Well, yes, there is a room 105... but we don't deal with it. That's a different property management company."

Now thoroughly confused, Unhappy Tourist says, "Property management company? I don't know what you're talking about. Don't you manage the Powder Puppy Lodge?"

At that point, depending on the training and innate humanity of the FDP, Confused Unhappy Tourist will either get a facile treatise on the difference between strata-titled condo hotels and real hotels, be assisted in discovering who to contact to get into room 105 - Hint: it's probably in the stuff Unhappy Tourist received but didn't bother to look at - or be met with a shrug and a, "Not my problem."

It sucks, but it could be worse. It could happen, and often does, in the middle of the night.

Clearly no one wins in this scenario. But before we tackle the thorny issue of how to make it better without trampling all over the property rights of the poor suckers who own the individual condos, we need, as my friend Leslie says, a bit of a history, and unfortunately, an economics lesson.

Let's suppose it's a nice, sunny day in Sea-to-Sky land, you have an irresistible hankerin' for the last of the fresh strawberries and, as good as they are, you want something better than whatever's been picked over at Nesters and decide it's a great day for a drive to Pemberton.

So you go.

You climb up into your trusty, white Subaru Outback, slip a Best of Gen X: Music to Complain To, compilation CD you burned into the player 'cuz you know your kids won't let you get away with playin' that crap when they're in the car, point it north, open the sunroof, hit cruise control, crank the volume a couple more notches and congratulate yourself for livin' the simple life.

Somewhere on the flat stretch of road before you get to the underpass followed by the tight right-hand turn at the bottom of the hill, you're distracted looking for the "repeat" button on the CD player because you want to start the Clash's Rock the Casbah over again since it seems to have captured your mood and you're having flashbacks to a girl - or guy, equal opportunity fantasy - whose name you can't quite remember but whose long-remembered taste is almost as strong in your mouth as those strawberries you're driving north to pick off the bush.

Momentarily distracted, you miss the tight left after the tight right, leave the road and the next thing you know your world is a topsy-turvy carnival ride of broken glass, flying coffee cups, loose papers, McDonald's wrappers, dust, gravel and the sound of metal being scraped into scrap.

Then it's over. For long seconds the only sound you hear is your own blood rushing through your ears and your heart pumping like a whole rhythm section of voodoo drums on human sacrifice night down in the bayou. But you're alive and unhurt. You're also upside down, hanging from your seatbelt, increasingly aware you've peed your pants and beginning to draw a crowd unsure whether they're about to find a living human or meat. All's well that ends well.

Except your Outback is a wreck and your favourite compilation CD is forever stuck in the player. The insurance company tells you it's a writeoff and offers you 15 grand less than you think it was worth. You tell the bloodsuckers to fix it instead since you too are fond of tilting at windmills. They tell you the parts alone would cost $85,000. You find this hard to believe since the whole thing new only cost $45,000. Digging into it, you find out they're right. Isn't life strange?

And that's the difference between condo hotels and real hotels. Betcha didn't see that coming.

Real hotels are a new Outback. Condo hotels are the retail-priced parts required to build one. They aren't nearly the same thing.

Condo hotels were a great idea and made Whistler what it is today because back in the dark ages of disco, no company in their right mind would have taken the risk of building hotels in the nascent resort of Whistler. They wouldn't have put that kind of dough at risk.

From a developer's perspective, condo hotels were pretty low risk. You sold the individual units before you ever put a shovel in the ground and, barring incompetence on the part of your project manager, knew what your profit was going in. The operating risk and eventual cost of building lodging the resort needed was spread across the pool of condo buyers. They were promised a nice cashflow - by a document called a pro forma which is developer Latin for wild-ass guess - and their "investment" was taxed at residential rates, which was not surprising because they paid residential prices, that is, the cost of the parts to rebuild the Outback. Condos sold like hotcakes and pretty soon there were lots of places for people to stay when they came to ski.

If we'd have waited for hotel management companies and developers to build real hotels, Whistler would still be a backwater regional ski town without any Olympic legacies. But with condo hotels constituting a critical mass of lodging, Whistler became attractive, hotelwise.

And thus began the comedy of errors. Next week, Part II.