drjeff
Well-known member
All makes perfect sense for a penny pincher. That's not me...bottom line doesn't drive my entertainment/recreation decisions all the time. I think everyone agrees a business has to be profitable, but there are different ways to squeeze out a profit and it seems lots of people don't like how K does that. Not sure what went on the upper echelons of SR management to decide to blow snow, but they obviously didn't ONLY consider the profit/loss, but that the PR, smiles and goodwill probably do a heck of a lot more good then holding back to save what is relatively peanuts. Do you know how much gatorade, chips, pizzas and things 800 teenage Brits consume? LOL..
Totally get how much $$ 800 or so teenage brits spend on sugary snack foods (have you ever seen a typical Brit's teeth? )
From what I garner, it sounds like SR and Loon needed to just patch up some of the terrain that so many of the Brits would be using. K, based on what I skied on at K, the day before the warm air arrived, is more likely looking at basically having to start over on the terrain that so many of the Brit's would be using. And having to blow enougn snow to reopen from likely close to scratch a few miles of terrain on some "gooey" ground now is a totally different situation than some patch work. With modern snowmaking technology, most heads of mountain ops these days can find out within a few hundred dollars what it would cost, given anticipated weather conditions to open a trail, and i'm sure those figures were weighed against the amount of revenue that the Brits were committed to for lodging, rentals and lessons and best guess based on past years of the amount of food and beverage revenue they consume.
If anything the biggest arguement against longer operations today for many a GM/Mountain Ops manager is the simple fact that modern technology today can give such a much more accurrate figure as to what it actually costs to make snow on a trail vs. the past where there was much more guess work involved. And in the business world there is a difference between hearing something like "I think it will cost around 20 grand to get that trail open" vs. "it will cost $22,750 based on X hours running Y number of this type of guns or we could open it for $24,250 based on Y number of that type of gun running for Z hours" Too much info can be both interesting and scary sometimes.
I never fully appreciated the "bean counter" side of things until I started running my own business and was signing the checks and really became aware of actual return on investment vs. theorectical/perceived return on investment. It's one thing to look at it when it's "other peoples money" it's another thing to look at it when it's YOUR money