Mount Snow changes Snowmaking plan!

[snowman]

Are you whining again?

Nope, pointing out stupidity this time. :-o

 

[Greg]

Nope, pointing out stupidity this time. :-o

Oh. Riiiight... :roll:

 

[snowman]

Show me ONE, yes ONE K whiner who owns a business of substance (which of course isn't one that's been affected by the changes at K). You can't. They're all 15-60K a year Joe Employee back seat drivers who are pissy because they can no longer get "free $hit"....so they come online voicing "Business Concerns".

 

[Greg]

Show me ONE, yes ONE K whiner who owns a business of substance (which of course isn't one that's been affected by the changes at K). You can't. They're all 15-60K a year Joe Employee back seat drivers who are pissy because they can no longer get "free $hit"....so they come online voicing "Business Concerns".

Pretty sweeping statement... :roll:

Let me remind you. This is a discussion forum. If you don't like the direction a particular thread is heading, just move on...

 

[millerm277]

No one. NO ONE...has argued that Powdr/SP should come in and drop $28MM like ASC did on Sugarbush or some such. You hold up Peaks as an example of this reckless up front spending when in fact their capital program this year is nothing of the sort. It simply delivers a notable bump from historical baselines while addressing clear areas of need and providing hope for the future that these guys know what they're doing.

Correct, Peaks spent a reasonable sum of money to make a noticeable improvement, and also has a clear plan for the future that will be good for both the skier and the resort.

You K whiners kill me. It's like "Who in the hell do Powdr think they are trying to make money at Killington. They should lose money for OUR benefit!"

K makes money, end of story. (8-14 million the past few years). It is the reason ASC survived for as long as it did.

Also, for the hundredth time, the price increase isn't the problem, it's raising the price, yet getting MUCH less for it that's the problem.

P.S. - Quoting something said on Kzone that was quoted by someone at a party (where probably everyone was drunk) is about 100 times worse than quoting wiki as the gospel, and people who quote wiki as the gospel is the whole premise of Steven Colbert's COMEDY show.

Well, Dave aka Cmfvrt, showed up there, and from my understanding, made a presentation and answered questions....no different than if it were a meeting at Killington with him.

 

[snowman]

Pretty sweeping statement... :roll:

Let me remind you. This is a discussion forum. If you don't like the direction a particular thread is heading, just move on...

Well, when the whiners start stooping to the lows of making SLANDEROUS BS statements about POWDR (a reasort management company) stealing paintings from people at a hotel they bought (a business they're not even in) somebody has got to take a stand. This whole K slamming thing is spiralling into a world where people (whiners) could start getting sued, and rightfully so.

 

[snowman]

K makes money, end of story. (8-14 million the past few years). It is the reason ASC survived for as long as it did.

Maybe? Financials are always sketchy, especially when you have such a large company that you can literally hide profits and losses at other resorts if it suits your needs at the time. The past couple years they likely were PREPARING FOR THE SALE and were therefore maximizing the profits on paper.

To put this all in terms ANYONE can understand, It's like a car. The window sticker says the thing gets 30 mpg, which SHOULD be true because it's regulated by the gov't. Still, you know the stickers are all BS so you're not surprised when it gets 20 mpg. Would you stake your life savings on a car getting you the window sticker mileage??? No. Neither would POWDR on an ASC financial, which most would consider to be a lot more sketchy than the EPA rating.

 

[snoseek]

Well, when the whiners start stooping to the lows of making SLANDEROUS BS statements about POWDR (a reasort management company) stealing paintings from people at a hotel they bought (a business they're not even in) somebody has got to take a stand. This whole K slamming thing is spiralling into a world where people (whiners) could start getting sued, and rightfully so.

do you even ski at killington a lot. i think the reason folks are bitchin is that they love to ski there, and are really upset about what is happening.

 

[snowman]

do you even ski at killington a lot. i think the reason folks are bitchin is that they love to ski there, and are really upset about what is happening.

People are getting upset about a company trying to make a resort they ski at as profitable as possible so that it will make some money so that they can improve it??!!? What a disaster! People ARE upset because they expected them to literally back up to the baselodge with a dumptruck full of money (in an ASC like manner, ASC, a company which in essence has never been solvent), tip it, and come with even more freebies for them 2 weeks after they took the place over without any regard to if they'll ever see any sort of return on the dumptruck load of cash. That's just plain F'N RIDICULOUS.

It's like your kid crying that you didn't spend $3000 on him/her in one weekend like your kids grandmother did (meanwhile, granny can't afford food for the rest of the month and dies of starvation) because you know better and you're too busy saving for your kids college education.

 

[snoseek]

People are getting upset about a company trying to make a resort they ski at as profitable as possible so that it will make some money so that they can improve it??!!? What a disaster! People ARE upset because they expected them to literally back up to the baselodge with a dumptruck full of money (in an ASC like manner, ASC, a company which in essence has never been solvent), tip it, and come with even more freebies for them 2 weeks after they took the place over without any regard to if they'll ever see any sort of return on the dumptruck load of cash. That's just plain F'N RIDICULOUS.

It's like your kid crying that you didn't spend $3000 on him/her in one weekend like your kids grandmother did (meanwhile, granny can't afford food for the rest of the month and dies of starvation) because you know better and you're too busy saving for your kids college education.

i hear what your saying, but do you really have a lot of history with this place? these people are just really passionate about their mountain. many feel this mountain can both make money, and please the customer. limiting services is not a good way to please customers, and angry customers is bad business. not asking for shitloads of $$$, just that the place is run like it should be.

 

[snowman]

i hear what your saying, but do you really have a lot of history with this place? these people are just really passionate about their mountain. many feel this mountain can both make money, and please the customer. limiting services is not a good way to please customers, and angry customers is bad business. not asking for shitloads of $$$, just that the place is run like it should be.

Atleast you're HEARING me, that's a start. I'm skier and passionate about the places I ski too, but if I bought that place or any ski resort I'd go in with the ASSUMPTION it's losing money and see what things REALLY look like at the end of the year when I have MY NUMBERS, not some potentially cooked ASC numbers. From a business perspective I agree with pretty much everything Powdr has done so far. They've also stated their business plan is not to cater to everyone (including people who formerly used ski school programs as daycares because they cost LESS than a daycare), and could likely care less about the whiners (aka freeloaders) because those are the people they were looking to get rid of anyway! You wanna ski k? Great! Freakin pay for it. Don't expect Powdr to pay YOU to ski K thought, which is what they would be doing if they ran it like ASC.

 

[Tin Woodsman]

Show me ONE, yes ONE K whiner who owns a business of substance (which of course isn't one that's been affected by the changes at K). You can't. They're all 15-60K a year Joe Employee back seat drivers who are pissy because they can no longer get "free $hit"....so they come online voicing "Business Concerns".

Actually, I haven't skied there in almost 10 years, so I don't have a dog in this hunt. I'm just calling them like I see them. Clearly the A41 pass was a dead end, and I said so in various places when it was devised. I also ridiculed those that complained of its pending demise towards the end of last season. It's smart to raise pass prices to a level that's comparable to your peer group. What I've been calling out is the obvious stupidity that has accompanied these moves, the list of which has been rehashed many times here and elsewhere, so I won't go into it.

These guys have given prospective customers nothing to be excited about for the coming season. The only ones who should be psyched are the locals with tele or AT gear - they'll have plenty of closed terrain at Pico and Killington to tour on midweek all by themselves.

As for your comment regarding the alleged income levels of the "whiners", I'll be happy to compare tax returns, but this isn't a dick waving contest. It's about business logic and right and wrong. Nevertheless, be my guest and have another glass of Kool-Aid.

 

[millerm277]

Maybe? Financials are always sketchy, especially when you have such a large company that you can literally hide profits and losses at other resorts if it suits your needs at the time. The past couple years they likely were PREPARING FOR THE SALE and were therefore maximizing the profits on paper.

Um, no...otherwise, they'd be saying Sugarloaf and Attitash were making money as well. Also, K has always made money since 1960 (other than in one year), why do you seem to be so certain that they couldn't be making money the past few years? Is it not possible to you that you could offer cheap skiing and make money off of it?

People are getting upset about a company trying to make a resort they ski at as profitable as possible so that it will make some money so that they can improve it??!!? What a disaster! People ARE upset because they expected them to literally back up to the baselodge with a dumptruck full of money (in an ASC like manner, ASC, a company which in essence has never been solvent), tip it, and come with even more freebies for them 2 weeks after they took the place over without any regard to if they'll ever see any sort of return on the dumptruck load of cash. That's just plain F'N RIDICULOUS.

I don't know of anyone who expected something like that. What we expected was a bit of a price hike, some moderate investment in the area along with fixing what was broken/damaged (Like what Peaks and Boyne have done), and keeping the main points of K the same. (Such as, all the terrain being accessible during the week, and a long season to name two).

 

[Tin Woodsman]

Atleast you're HEARING me, that's a start. I'm skier and passionate about the places I ski too, but if I bought that place or any ski resort I'd go in with the ASSUMPTION it's losing money and see what things REALLY look like at the end of the year when I have MY NUMBERS, not some potentially cooked ASC numbers. From a business perspective I agree with pretty much everything Powdr has done so far. They've also stated their business plan is not to cater to everyone (including people who formerly used ski school programs as daycares because they cost LESS than a daycare), and could likely care less about the whiners (aka freeloaders) because those are the people they were looking to get rid of anyway! You wanna ski k? Great! Freakin pay for it. Don't expect Powdr to pay YOU to ski K thought, which is what they would be doing if they ran it like ASC.

Wow - you really don't know what you're talking about. If there was any doubt as to the veracity of the ASC numbers, the buyer could have insisted on a carve-out audit of K-Mart's financials for the last few years. This step is generally only taken when the acquiror os a public company themselves but can be used in many other situations. That would resolve a lot of the questions right there.

Regardless, it's not about freeloading for many of the people who are calling K-Mart out, it's about what makes sense as a business for one's customers.

1) K's childrens programs are now FAR more expensive than the relevant peer group (Okemo, Stratton, SB, etc...). More expensive even than Beaver Creek. That is not a case of eliminating a "loss leader" and bringing it to profitability. That's fundamentally misunderstanding your market. But fel free to blame it on those damn freeloaders.

2) Closing Skyship midweek - are you implying that "the whiners" should pay extra for the privilege of skiing this pod? I guess you are indignant that midweek visitors should be so bold to actually expect 3000' of vertical instead of the 2000' they will get when Skyeship Stage 1 is closed for the vast majority of the season.

3) Terrain - want to come up midweek and sample the 200 trails of Killington? Sorry - only about half of them will be available with the closure of Pico and Skyeship Stage 1. Should "the whiners" pay more than the rack rate for the privilege of skiing all of the advertised 200 trails? What a bunch of frickin freeloaders!!!


Ski areas generally sell for 8-10x their EBITDA. The $70MM purchase price of Killington would indicate that, at least on an EBITDA level, it was one of the more profitable ski areas in the East considering it had very little real estate. The new owners have combined penny-wise and pound-foolish decisions with a truly incredible knack for screwing up PR. In fact, they may well have done EVERYTHING wrong on the PR front, which is both impressive and difficult to do. They have articulated no vision, no long term plan, and nothing worth looking forward to. The people who are angry about this run the gammut from locals to 20-something weekenders to families who own homes int he area and have been skiing there for decades. But I suppose it's just easier to label them all as freeloading whiners than to actually take a look at some of the threads on K-Zone where these different customer groups sound off.

Get a clue.

 

[threecy]

The only one talking about massive dollops of cashup front is you. You've been arguing against that red herring all summer long, and yet no one has advocated that position. I can only conclude from this thatyou are either a Powdr/SP shill, or you lack the most basic skills of reading comprehension. Clearly it's not the latter.

So because I refuse to join the angry mob, I'm a Powdr/SP shill? Wayyyyyyyy off base. I don't even know any SP/Powdr employees, nor have I ever been a fan of Killington as a ski area. I'm simply saying it makes no sense to burn SP/Powdr at the stake for being smart, at least businesswise. No comment PR-wise. Give them a season or so at the helm before you throw them under the bus. While I'm not calling Peak reckless spenders, I again have to defend SP/Powdr for not opening their wallet big time (or taking out loans/finding more capital) right away.

Again, if they came into this with a PR campaign like that of Peak (they've been carefully making themselves very accessible so that people on these forums feel as if they know people in their upper management personally) and put a positive spin on these decisions, I don't think we'd be seeing reactions like this to everything they do.

 

[threecy]

1) K's childrens programs are now FAR more expensive than the relevant peer group (Okemo, Stratton, SB, etc...). More expensive even than Beaver Creek. That is not a case of eliminating a "loss leader" and bringing it to profitability. That's fundamentally misunderstanding your market. But fel free to blame it on those damn freeloaders.

2) Closing Skyship midweek - are you implying that "the whiners" should pay extra for the privilege of skiing this pod? I guess you are indignant that midweek visitors should be so bold to actually expect 3000' of vertical instead of the 2000' they will get when Skyeship Stage 1 is closed for the vast majority of the season.

3) Terrain - want to come up midweek and sample the 200 trails of Killington? Sorry - only about half of them will be available with the closure of Pico and Skyeship Stage 1. Should "the whiners" pay more than the rack rate for the privilege of skiing all of the advertised 200 trails? What a bunch of frickin freeloaders!!!

1) If it is indeed a bad idea, they will drop the prices. Otherwise, good for them.

2 + 3) They have a slightly lower midweek rate last I knew...even with Pico and Stage 1 closed two? days per week (4? for Stage 1), there's still more terrain available to ski than pretty much every other ski area in New England. Again, I'm not going to defend the ski area itself, because I don't enjoy skiing it too much.

I just realized this is a Mt. Snow thread. Wow. It says something about Peak when the arguments end up about other ski areas, as opposed to them - not a bad thing.

 

[millerm277]

They have articulated no vision, no long term plan, and nothing worth looking forward to.

I agree with pretty much all of what you said, but above everything else...this is the biggest problem in my opinion. The ONLY clear vision that has been put out there is "we want to build a village", everything else is answered with vague statements, and for ALL of the things that we are complaining about right now, Killington was not upfront about them, instead they waited until AFTER the initial pass deadlines to announce them, and even then many of them were the result of locals and insiders knowing what is going on, and then K admitting that they were true after someone posted about it. That is not an acceptable way to inform your customers of change.

I just realized this is a Mt. Snow thread. Wow. It says something about Peak when the arguments end up about other ski areas, as opposed to them - not a bad thing.

There's just nothing to discuss about Mt. Snow...they're doing everything right from the skiers point of view, and I think it will pay off for them.

So far they've:
Cut F&B prices a bit
Not raised prices hugely
Had a great backup plan for dealing with the Somerset reservoir problem
Made a good investment in the ski area
Stated a pretty clear vision for the area.

 

[snoseek]

Atleast you're HEARING me, that's a start. I'm skier and passionate about the places I ski too, but if I bought that place or any ski resort I'd go in with the ASSUMPTION it's losing money and see what things REALLY look like at the end of the year when I have MY NUMBERS, not some potentially cooked ASC numbers. From a business perspective I agree with pretty much everything Powdr has done so far. They've also stated their business plan is not to cater to everyone (including people who formerly used ski school programs as daycares because they cost LESS than a daycare), and could likely care less about the whiners (aka freeloaders) because those are the people they were looking to get rid of anyway! You wanna ski k? Great! Freakin pay for it. Don't expect Powdr to pay YOU to ski K thought, which is what they would be doing if they ran it like ASC.

so i'm going to assume you don't ski killington.

 

[snowman]

1)

If it is indeed a bad idea, they will drop the prices. Otherwise, good for them.

Did someone mention a labor shortage this year? Powdr is likely going to pay a premium rate to instructors to get the best in the area while other resorts can't cover there programs.

2 + 3) They have a slightly lower midweek rate last I knew...even with Pico and Stage 1 closed two? days per week (4? for Stage 1), there's still more terrain available to ski than pretty much every other ski area in New England. Again, I'm not going to defend the ski area itself, because I don't enjoy skiing it too much.

EXACTLY. THERE IS MORE. The lower Skyeship terrain is pretty useless, completely agreed that even with the closed terrain they STILL offer more skiing for the buck than any other resort and will have the money to spare thru the cuts to blow some snow to cover it!

I'll explain why K's books are most likely cooked later, gotta head out for now.

 

[Newpylong]

I think we all need to ski! lol.

Mount Snow has always made a decent amount of snow, but it will be great to know there is a decent size area in Southern VT with dependable snow, that we can all meet at maybe!