Colorado Ski resorts

All 26 ski resorts in Colorado set new records. Two years running nearly 12 million skiers and snowboarders visit Colorado’s slopes.

The last season didn’t differ a lot from the previous one as there were only about 28,000 visits more..

The president of Colorado Ski Country USA (CSCUSA) and CEO Rob Perlman said that he was satisfied with the results because there were circumstances such as Front Range blizzards that clogged traveling to Colorado during a key period. As Perlman said at Copper Mountain annual meeting it was a great success for that period.

According to the subset of the Colorado’s resorts there were 85,000 visits more in destination areas in comparison with the last year. And if we take the five-year average, then we’ll see that it is 7.4 percent higher.

Even small areas like Eldora, Loveland, Powderhorn and Eldora took 13.4 visit more in comparison with the previous five-year period.

It should be mentioned that 2006-2007 season started earlier because there ware heavy falls of snow in October.

There were some suggestions in December that there could be little snow in Colorado during the winter but in some weeks the opposite was proved. Because of heavy snowfalls Denver International Airport stopped working that made it difficult to get to the mountains.

Though in-state skier numbers dipped slightly during the season that decline was more than offset by out-of-state visitors, as Perlman said. Skiers from Colorado’s core markets — Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York and California — climbed by about four percent, and now they comprise 40 percents of the state’s skier visits.

International visits also increased in 2 percent. There were much more visits from such countries as from Germany, Australia and New Zealand in comparison with the previous years.

Perlman also said that with poor snow in New England and on the West Coast, Colorado also wracked up a record 23 percent share of the U.S. market this past winter. According to the outgoing CSCUSA chair Chris Diamond’s opinion the positive trend dates back to 2003, when the U.S. economy bottomed out after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

In response to that economic challenge, resorts moved to reset and control cost structures. And since then, the industry has started to refocus and achieve steady gains. So the fiscal climate changed a lot, too.

"We built a much more effective business model. Capital markets view what we do very favorably now," Diamond said, holding up the recent climb in Vail Resorts stock value as an example of the positive change in Colorado.