Cannonball
New member
Not able to get on the hill this weekend, so the best I can do for a trip report was the expo last night. I don't go every year so it's a little hard to judge, but I'd say this one was above average. The vibe was good and the exhibitors seem to have stepped it up a bit. A few of the standouts:
Long Trail Beer cart. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for the guy working the cart. The line at the Long Trail draught booth would start to get a little bit long and the beer cart guy would roll right up to the line of people! Brilliant. Drinking $7 beers really made it feel like the ski season was underway :beer:
Cannon brought an entire old tram car to the show and they had some classic footage from the 1930's playing. Their pre-scheduled "cram the tram" giveaways brought a lot of people to booth all at once for free t-shirts.
Stowe had an impressive presence that covered basically a whole row of booths. It did sort of beg the question: if they spent less on stuff like this could their tickets cost less?
Sunday River had a giant, realistic 3D model of the whole resort. It was pretty cool to see. But the general conversation around the model was "yeah, see how spread out it is...PIA to get around!"
Ski the East was doing their usual thing...which basically consists of just being groovy. So of course they had a consistent crowd of groovy people hanging around.
New England Ski Museum, Friends of Tuckerman Ravine, New England Disabled Sports and some of the other non-profits had cool booths with good people. It was god to see that they seemed to be attracting visitors pretty much the whole time.
Deals = none. I looked at some skis, snowboards, bindings, and helmets. I found them to be pretty much the same pricing that you'd find in any shop. It's not clear to me why people get hyped up to sift through piles of regularly priced equipment in an uncomfortable setting. But there were plenty of people buying, so mission accomplished for the sellers.
One interesting thing that stood out to me was the difference in sales strategies of some of the resorts. Most of the resorts do the normal thing: have a display with some free stickers and pamphlets with some staff hanging around casually to talk to you if you want. But a few of the resorts (notably Jay Peak, Sugarloaf, and Stowe) were intensely focused on bookings and sales. I walked up to the Jay Peak booth and was greeted by a row of people staring into their laptop screens with bookings being their only interest. If you weren't there to buy a condo or a book a week's stay, they weren't interested in talking to you. It came across as pretty unfriendly, but realistically I bet those resorts actually got more out of the show than the others.
I'd certainly rather be skiing than be at the show. But if you have nothing else to do it's worth a visit.
Long Trail Beer cart. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for the guy working the cart. The line at the Long Trail draught booth would start to get a little bit long and the beer cart guy would roll right up to the line of people! Brilliant. Drinking $7 beers really made it feel like the ski season was underway :beer:
Cannon brought an entire old tram car to the show and they had some classic footage from the 1930's playing. Their pre-scheduled "cram the tram" giveaways brought a lot of people to booth all at once for free t-shirts.
Stowe had an impressive presence that covered basically a whole row of booths. It did sort of beg the question: if they spent less on stuff like this could their tickets cost less?
Sunday River had a giant, realistic 3D model of the whole resort. It was pretty cool to see. But the general conversation around the model was "yeah, see how spread out it is...PIA to get around!"
Ski the East was doing their usual thing...which basically consists of just being groovy. So of course they had a consistent crowd of groovy people hanging around.
New England Ski Museum, Friends of Tuckerman Ravine, New England Disabled Sports and some of the other non-profits had cool booths with good people. It was god to see that they seemed to be attracting visitors pretty much the whole time.
Deals = none. I looked at some skis, snowboards, bindings, and helmets. I found them to be pretty much the same pricing that you'd find in any shop. It's not clear to me why people get hyped up to sift through piles of regularly priced equipment in an uncomfortable setting. But there were plenty of people buying, so mission accomplished for the sellers.
One interesting thing that stood out to me was the difference in sales strategies of some of the resorts. Most of the resorts do the normal thing: have a display with some free stickers and pamphlets with some staff hanging around casually to talk to you if you want. But a few of the resorts (notably Jay Peak, Sugarloaf, and Stowe) were intensely focused on bookings and sales. I walked up to the Jay Peak booth and was greeted by a row of people staring into their laptop screens with bookings being their only interest. If you weren't there to buy a condo or a book a week's stay, they weren't interested in talking to you. It came across as pretty unfriendly, but realistically I bet those resorts actually got more out of the show than the others.
I'd certainly rather be skiing than be at the show. But if you have nothing else to do it's worth a visit.
