2013 / 2014 skier days ?

lono

Member
Whitefish reported 346 k skier days over a 121 day season, a new record. Saturday Dec. 29 tallied over 7600 costumers, also a record. I've always been interested in the business of skiing and skier day counts give me an idea of overall crowds.
With all the industry insiders on FTO I was hoping to get more numbers. Utah /Co/Cali/ etc. Thanks.
 
They haven't been released yet. State by state numbers typically come out in June. Colorado is usually around 12 million but should do far better than average this year. Utah and Vermont, in contrast, usually jockey for third and fourth place at around 4 Million. California is in between but figures to be way below average this year.
 
Sorry Marc, I was unclear, I only care about individual ski area numbers. What a fun adventure you guys had! A great report.
 
lono":282n85yj said:
I only care about individual ski area numbers.

I think you'll find a large percentage of resorts don't publish numbers at that level. A few do, but most seem to get reported at a regional or state level. A few of the public companies (like Vail Inc) do publish resort level numbers although they've started some regional numbers too and I wonder if/when they will make that switch fully. Any in particular that you want to know?
 
I realise private Co. don't often report numbers, was hoping for inside info as well for any north American ski areas. Thanks.
 
Very few resorts release specific numbers, other than those owned by publicly traded companies.
 
It's quite difficult to get this data in any systematic way. Recently there was an online article listing the "Top 20 Areas in Skier Visits"

1 Vail 1,634,250
2 Breckenridge 1,600,750
3 Mammoth 1,128,500
4 Keystone 1,036,000
5 Steamboat 923,576
6 Winter Park
7 Beaver Creek 919,000
8 Heavenly 890,750
9 Copper Mt
10 Park City
11 Northstar 737,000
12 Snowmass 732,251
13 Squaw Valley
14 Killington
15 Okemo 614,000
16 Snow Summit/Bear Mt. 800,000
17 Snoqualmie 550,000
18 Holiday Valley 545,058
19 Canyons 500,000
20 Deer Valley

The data was a 4-year average from 2008-2011 and note that real numbers were not quoted for 6 areas and round number estimates were used for another 3.
 
Thanks Tony. Holiday Valley, wow that's alota skiers on not much of a hill!
Anybody know what their local hills do?
 
lono":435v0chq said:
Holiday Valley, wow that's alota skiers on not much of a hill!

That's what you get when you are close to big populations though. Toronto, Buffalo and Cleveland all close by and it's the best terrain for a 750' vertical hill that is that close to them. Also helps to have added skier visits the next ridge over at Holimont and a great little party town at the base.


I've attached some old data for Colorado. Vail Inc left CSC USA and then the other resorts didn't want to have by-resort stats known/published so they stopped providing this level of detail. If you are willing to dig however, usually in master plan and EIS documents the actual tallies get published. But that is a one by one digging exercise.

For Eldora, they were bouncing in the ~300-375K range for a while, but they have to be well over 400K this year with the Epic Pass mess.

skivisits.JPG
 
Tony Crocker":19nq2u3s said:
Someone on Mammoth Forum posted this link: http://www.vanat.ch/RM-world-report-2014.pdf
Page 9 lists every ski area in the world that gets 1+ million skier visits.
Page 18-19 lists skier visits by country.
Each country is analyzed individually starting on page 22.

Like Wow!!! Not sure he has every ski area in the world that gets 1+ million, but all the major destination ones. I'm thinking that maybe one Quebec ski area might be around one million.

Impressive list of countries, but noticed that he didn't mention ski countries like Lebanon and Israel and maybe others that are definitely more accessible than Afghanistan and North Korea.
 
Lebanon and Israel were the 2 omissions I noted also. I don't think anyone in the East is close to a million skier visits now. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Killington in its heyday was in the 900K range.

Mammoth is only going to have about 850K this year. The ~1.25 million in that chart is an accurate figure as an average of the past decade though.
 
Tony Crocker":1pdiqc3m said:
Lebanon and Israel were the 2 omissions I noted also. I don't think anyone in the East is close to a million skier visits now. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that Killington in its heyday was in the 900K range.

I might be mistaken, but at one point MSS cracked one million, but that was maybe 10 years ago.
 
Hard to judge the 1M visit limit as particularly specific or identifying of "major resort" status.

How about Steamboat which bounces up and down around that mark consistently. Or Beaver Creek which is just barely under that mark now. Or Heavenly which is also barely under that limit in a normal season, etc... As always you have to set some sort of a limit and a nice round number fits the bill, but leaves plenty of debate and grey area.
 
EMSC":3a0xse9q said:
Hard to judge the 1M visit limit as particularly specific or identifying of "major resort" status.
It's a round number, and while it means mega-resort in North America, it's not that high a threshold in the Alps. There are a lot of "important" resorts here in the 300K-500K range, yet I'm somewhat embarrassed to say there are about 10 resorts in the Alps on that list for which I have zero recollection of even reading about. Perhaps James can enlighten us.

EMSC":3a0xse9q said:
How about Steamboat which bounces up and down around that mark consistently. Or Beaver Creek which is just barely under that mark now. Or Heavenly which is also barely under that limit in a normal season, etc
They are averaging a few seasons rather than using just one, which lessens the impact of an unusually good or bad snow year. That's the way I would do it.

There are some divisions I find inconsistent. Why are Val Thorens and Les Menuires listed separate from each other in the same valley and Meribel separate while Courchevel and the upper Meribel/Mottaret sector of the Trois Vallees are combined? Add them up and it's about 6 million. Val d'Isere is separate from Tignes (combined is about 2.8 million)? I have not skied either of these yet, but in both cases I'm fairly sure the lift tickets are combined for the entire ski region.

In the Arlberg, St.Anton/St. Christophe/Stuben are listed alone. Lech/Zurs is on the same ticket but bus rather than lift connected. I note that James' presumed less busy destination of Ischgl/Samnaun Silvretta Arena is #4 on the list at 2 million, about double St.Anton/St. Christophe/Stuben.

Finally Chamonix, Davos/Klosters and the Jungfrauregion have multiple smaller areas not lift connected but are listed on a combined basis here.
 
Tony Crocker":13ox1qed said:
There are some divisions I find inconsistent. Why are Val Thorens and Les Menuires listed separate from each other in the same valley and Meribel separate while Courchevel and the upper Meribel/Mottaret sector of the Trois Vallees are combined? Add them up and it's about 6 million. Val d'Isere is separate from Tignes (combined is about 2.8 million)? I have not skied either of these yet, but in both cases I'm fairly sure the lift tickets are combined for the entire ski region.

This might have changed, but when I skied Val d'Isère last 2000, they had resort tickets and combined area tickets. The same logic applied at Les trois vallées in 2003. The combine area ticket was more expensive.

Tony Crocker":13ox1qed said:
Finally Chamonix, Davos/Klosters and the Jungfrauregion have multiple smaller areas not lift connected but are listed on a combined basis here.

But that doesn't explain the Chamonix logic. All areas are on the same ticket in 2003, but I believe that you can buy individual area tickets also. Flégère and Le Brévent were even separate lift ticket wise.

I know I had a Jungfrauregion combine ticket back in 2003 which combined Best, Grindelwald, Wengen and Muerren.
 
admin":2kpbolj4 said:
No clue. Both LCC ski areas are privately held.
But they are on Forest Service land, which means the info should be available. The Park City group are on private land, and thus the breakdown among those 3 areas is more difficult to come by. Their total is shown as "Summit County" in the table in this reference: http://www.ski-blog.com/skier_visits.php

The table above is from 1995-96 through 2005-06 and I haven't been able to find an update. The relationship between Alta and Snowbird skier visits in that table is quite interesting. Alta visits were much higher in 1995-96 and declined over the next 8 years, abruptly jumping back to the 1995-96 level in 2004-05, the first year of high speed Collins. Snowbird visits rose steadily during this period, overtaking Alta in 1999-2000. During the last 2 seasons of the table (with high speed Collins) Alta and Snowbird visits were similar.

From recent observed crowd trends I would expect that Alta visits have been flat while Snowbird's have continued to rise since 2005-06. I e-mailed SkiUtah to request an updated table.
 
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