The Voice of the Mountain Resort Industry  |  Est. 1964

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  • The Challenges of Selling Summer

    Guests really enjoy summer in the mountains. So why don’t they return more often? Summer operations offer ski areas many benefits, including a reduced reliance on winter revenues, year-round employment for more staff, an introduction to non-winter sports enthusiasts, resilience against climate change, and absorption of overhead. It takes a careful, strategic approach to take…

  • What Over Industrialized Skiing Gets Wrong

    What “Big Glisse” gets wrong. I first realized industrialized skiing was in trouble when the ink on my business cards as a Skiing magazine “Executive Editor” was still wet. This was 2003, and I was driving one of the best ski cars ever built: a Saab 900 hatchback. I’d picked up mine with 180K on…

  • Best and Worst in Marketing 2024-25

    A mix of inspired brilliance and uninspired misses round out a comparatively less splashy year in ski area marketing. The relative lack of buzz around ski area marketing this year is somewhat understandable. Our global society is experiencing distractions that hit differently than those we went through during the pandemic. A lot is changing. To…

  • A Bold New Chapter

    While Monarch Mountain’s No Name Basin expansion makes the ski area much bigger, the goal is for it not to change a whole lot. Monarch Mountain, an independent ski resort nestled in the heart of the Colorado Rockies, embarked on its most significant expansion in decades last summer. The No Name Basin project, which adds…

  • Partnering for Change

    Municipal partnerships and an increased focus on advocacy boost sustainability efforts for mountain resorts and their communities. The collaboration between Rachelle Leishman, sustainability manager at Brundage Mountain, Idaho, and Meredith Todd, city and sustainability planner for nearby McCall, started in 2023 with an idea. Todd had conducted a greenhouse gas inventory for the City of…

  • Adopting Automation

    How two ski areas took the leap into automated snowmaking, and what the results have shown. In response to increasingly fickle snowmaking windows and rising energy and labor costs, Mountain Creek, N.J., and Giants Ridge, Minn., invested heavily to introduce automation to their snowmaking systems ahead of the 2024-25 season. Replacing manual equipment with automated…

  • Dig Deep on Data

    Use AI to mine your data cache and unlock operational insights.  Resort operators accumulate vast amounts of data across operations like F&B outlets, ski school, ticketing, season passes, and CRM systems, often storing it in siloed, on-premises data centers. While this practice keeps data secure, it fails to unlock its potential for driving innovation.  By…

  • Mastering Your Mindset

    Mindset is a leadership tool that sets the tone for your whole team. Mindset is a powerful thing. It influences our behavior, decision-making, communication, and confidence. It can be the key to our success, or our primary limiting factor. And it doesn’t just affect us as individuals—those personal feelings can permeate the entire work environment,…

  • F&B Tech Heats Up

    To take advantage of tech in F&B, involve your staff in the planning, decision-making, and implementation. “What’s the next big thing in F&B tech? Where should we be implementing innovation?” These are the most common questions our hospitality consulting team hears these days. They are usually delivered with a mix of curiosity and desperation, as if…

  • Mountain Spy :: May 2025

    The Spy asks: “I’ve heard the food is expensive. Is it worth it?” There’s the amount you pay for a meal at a restaurant on the corner of downtown USA, and then there are “resort prices” for a similar meal at places like Disney World, Six Flags, and ski areas, which jack up the cost…