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Marketing To The 'Go Anywhere' Global Skier

By Patrick Thorne
August 17, 2007

Countering this desire to find "something different" is the globalization of the ski industry. This has gathered pace more rapidly and more recently, thanks in part to the involvement of global brands in resorts worldwide and in part to the digital communication revolution of the past decade. Indeed, it has made all ski resorts equal, wherever they are in the world, albeit with some a little more equal than others.

Ski resorts all over the world now can be reached by skiers all over the world. All who can click a mouse can find information on any resort in the world and probably be booked on a plane to be there within the day. It also means that resorts are slowly losing their regional characteristics and all striving to reach the best international standards in all respects.

There will, of course, always be local markets, loyal markets, but still, there is the growing trend of the "go anywhere" global skier. That growing market can presumably only be slowed by guilt or legislation at the amount of CO2 our globe- hopping ski antics generate.

It seems common sense that the ski resorts, wherever they are in the world, that have the best systems in place, will be the winners in this global trend. Those with multilingual Web sites that work and lead through to smooth, complete booking service are the obvious beneficiaries of this growth area in our ever more competitive business.

But wait. Could it be that centuries of evolution within different societies could still hold up the globalization of skiing? Could it be that while technology races on to make everything possible, skiers in different countries or continents may have differing attitudes to how they actually use and interpret the information provided by a ski resort in another country or continent, however efficiently the information is delivered?

Here is how ski resort marketing typically goes across the Pond:

Snow reporting is painfully honest. Europe's ski journalists and tour operators are about five times more likely to get press releases from North American resorts every time they've had an "awesome" inch of fresh snow. That's true even though Europe has about five times as many ski areas as North America. The odds of an Alpine resort mentioning it has had a record-breaking three-foot dump are far smaller.

Snowfall is low on the marketing agenda in the Alps. The philosophy is that you book your ski vacation and you make the best of it, whatever the conditions. Period.

U.S. resorts may choose to post a suspiciously blue skied, white fresh fluffy powdered "Picture of the Day" on its Web site, every day. The Euro resort will stoically show a live cam image of a desolate looking brown muddy piste resembling a still from a Cold War spy drama movie. They often make the skiing look worse than it actually is.

The logic is not just marketing masochism, but that utter honesty is best. European skiers may dream of a blue sky powder day, but should not expect their destination resort will definitely provide it every trip, or indeed, any trip. "Get real," they seem to be saying.

"No one in Europe can afford to lie to customers as it would be like shooting yourself in the foot today. If you lie on snow coverage, you lose your client's confidence, which is the hardest thing to recover," says Guy Chanel, marketing boss at Villars, a top Swiss resort.

"Villars was chosen for a new GPS snow measure test system last winter," Chanel says. "The ski lift company had different GPS-equipped devices placed on different points of the ski area, in the resort, on frequently used slopes, and on the top of the summits. Every day we publish a snow report, by 8:30 a.m. at the latest, detailing every open or closed slope, the avalanche danger level, and the measurements of the morning taken by the GPS system linked to a computer."

Web sites could do better. "Internet sites tend to be a very mixed bag. Many European ones open with Flash video and audio, which is a plain waste of time and even an annoyance," says Richard Davidson of Ski Europe, a leading North American tour operator to ski resorts in Europe.

Providing facts that skiers might want to know may not be a strong point either. "Few sites have their information well organized and easily navigated. One of the most common questions sent to our query service concerns opening and closing dates. I dread those questions. You can spend a long time searching resort sites and not finding key information that you need," Davidson continues.

"Quite a few still believe in user-unfriendly Flash such as Megeve," said Frenchman Xavier Schouller, head of Peak Retreats, a European tour operator. He disagrees with Davidson on information provision however, at least for French resorts.

"They all seem to have pretty useful Web sites with usually much the same info (ski area/lift passes, ski schools, children, other activities, accommodation, apres-ski, village map, events, webcams/photos, access, and weather)."

However Alpine resorts do have the added complication of trying to make their sites work in multiple languages (human, not computer). A boom market for Alpine ski areas since 2000 has been the Eastern European nations, led by Russia. Most of the big resorts have been quick to convert their booking engines in to half a dozen, even a dozen different languages in order to present a friendly face to potential visitors from these nations.

This is one approach where Europe appears to lead over most North American resorts.

Size matters. With Europe's ski areas cramped together, (at least compared to most in North America), and without the ski area boundary that borders a Canadian or U.S. ski area, more and more resorts have created physical lift links and offer joint lift ticketing on an ever greater scale.

The French lead Europe, and the world, in physically linking resorts together by ski lift. Half of the world's top ten biggest ski regions are here, including the biggest, the Three Valleys, and this leads their marketing effort.

Austria has taken the high-tech route of offering up to 90 separate ski areas (think every ski resort in three or four New England states), on one fully interchangeable, hands free lift ticket. The Salzburg Superski Card is the biggest with 2,200km (1,3,75 miles) of trails, served by nearly a thousand lifts giving combined uplift in excess of a million skiers-per-hour. That should be enough to keep you busy for the weekend.

These kinds of amalgamations help smaller resorts compete with the big players when, with more than 3,000 ski areas in Europe, it's easy to get missed. It's a route long talked about in the U.S. and tentatively tried out by a few areas in Utah, Montana, and Vermont. But cooperation for mutual benefit and the fierce commercial independence of North American resorts doesn't seem to fit so comfortably with such a route. Otherwise, Park City's resorts would long since have thrown up a few lifts to cross borders and more people would have noticed that the Moonlight Basin, Big Sky, Yellowstone Club in Montana is probably North America's largest lift linked ski area.

The truth is that many European skiers have different ski vacation expectations than most North American skiers. It's also true that, in many ways, most resorts in the Alps lag behind those of the U.S.

The portrayal by some U.S. resorts that their conditions are eternally fantastic just doesn't wash with European skiers, who know, logically, they can't always be. It has to snow sometime to get that 500 feet of perfect powder, right? It can't always be at night to allow for those 20,000 sunshine hours a month. Can it?

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