Quote:
Originally Posted by gladerider 
i see one thing different with intrawest after the sales. they spend a lot of money on marketing. will it raise my cost to visit intrawest resort? likely.
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One of the things they've done, and part of the reason I think they brought in Jensen, is reorganize management. Previously, Intrawest ran each area individually, and within the are real estate and operations were handled seperately, with littl or no communication between the two, much less between different resorts. You can imagine the amound of duplication and poor communication this would cause. By consolidating a lot of functions (why have 13 HR departments, 13 accounting units, etc, when you can have 1?), they've saved a lot of money.
On the advertising side, with better coordination it becomes a lot easier to spend more wisely- look at what the Muellers do- every ad for Sunapee is also an ad for Okemo and Crested Butte. So, while Intrawest may be getting much better coverage, they're probably spending less.
On the publicly-traded private equity group angle, I highly doubt the IPOs were a financing event for any of them. They provided liquidity for the founders, and a simpler way to transfer equity to the next generation of Managing Directors. I never considered it to be a good investment, and have advised against anyone putting them into their portfolios.