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For as long as ski resorts have been offering skiing, they are still learning how to price it. “We’re just beginning to understand how to manage and improve our price strategy in the winter based on the time of season and potential excess inventory,” says Tom Pettigrew, director of skier services at Park City Mountain Resort, Utah. That being the case, with basically just two products—skiing and snowboarding—imagine the pricing challenges resorts with summer operations are facing.


Summer Vs Winter

The biggest pricing difference between summer and winter activities at resorts has to do with access. Winter pricing is all access, for the most part. Some resorts have experimented with trying to limit access, but because of the acreage and size of the winter operation, this is difficult to manage.

Summer operations, on the other hand, are more limited in size, and access can be better controlled. As a result, à la carte and combination activity pricing is possible.

Park City’s summer operation runs from mid-May to mid-October, and includes three chairlifts for mountain biking, four Alpine slides, a mountain coaster, zipline, adventure zone and kiddie park.

While access can be better controlled in the summer, not all summer activities are created equal. Some activities have limited inventory, for example. “There are only so many seats to do a ropes course or zipline. They’re like golf in that respect,” says Charles Blier, executive VP and GM at Camelback, Pa. In summer, the resort operates the Camelbeach water park and a dryland adventure park that includes a mountain coaster, airbag, climbing wall, ropes course, bungee jump, zipline and other activities, some with more limited inventory than others.


Customer Flow and Pricing

Blier says it took a while to understand customer flow through the adventure park, and therefore to devise the most appropriate pricing strategy. “We found packaging activities together works really well,” he says. Blier compares Camelback’s summer pricing to a restaurant menu. There are à la carte items as well as combination meals—a mountain coaster, zipline and ropes course, for example, or some other combo for a certain price. “The packages are selling like hotcakes,” he says, sticking with the food analogy.

The water park, with unlimited inventory, is priced more like skiing, with day and half-day tickets and two main price points, for guests over 48 inches and under 48 inches. “That’s more like a buffet,” Blier says. Partake of what you want for one price.

The two parks are separate entities, cross promoted but sold separately. The dryland park is open for nine months, the water park for three. “’There are deals for both, but you buy them separately,” Blier says.

As circumstances change, the pricing may, too. Case in point: the hotel that Camelback is constructing. “That creates opportunities for more packaging,” he says.

If Blier likes the restaurant analogy to explain Camelback’s summer pricing strategy, Alex Moser, marketing director at Seven Springs, Pa., draws on the cruise ship model. “There’s a million things to do,” he says.

Seven Springs’ summer operation includes two golf courses, a 51-station clay shoot, six zip courses, and a 15-zip, three-hour canopy tour. The main attractions can be purchased individually or combined with lodging packages.

Another set of activities—Alpine slide, summer tubing, disk golf—are bundled together. Guests buy all-access wristbands. “It’s all about value,” Moser says. “We don’t want families continually dipping into their wallets. We sell it once.”

Pricing for all these activities is flexible. The marketing team meets once a week to see what is selling and what’s not. “If things are slow, we’ll drop prices a bit,” Moser says. “It’s like a sports team with hot tickets. Variable pricing gives us a lot of flexibility. It’s all about yielding.”

Pettigrew agrees. “We’re trying to encourage customers to move to higher price point items and remain at the park for as long as possible, and like winter, we manage yield per customer.”


Adding Options

The more activities a resort adds, the more opportunity it has to innovate on pricing and keep customers in the park. Park City, for example, sells summer season passes, day passes, à la carte tickets, combination activity packages, and premium activity add-ons. The resort experimented with selling tickets on Liftopia, but Pettigrew says “summer visitors are not searching that mechanism to find value purchases as they do in the winter.”

The resort does use its own site and other partners to sell its summer activities. The resort also leverages its winter group relationships to sell the summer operation.

While adding new attractions can boost attendance, it can be at the expense of other activities. “We were concerned that we would see a significant decline in Alpine Slide sales when we added the coaster,” Pettigrew says. “And the Slides had more capacity than the coaster.”

To counter this expected decline, Park City began packaging the two activities—its first foray into packaging and combination pricing. It worked, and Park City now offers many packages and premium add-ons.

Louis Dufour, president of Mont Saint-Sauveur, which operates a large water park in the summer along with a growing array of dryland activities, says summer activities put resorts squarely in the entertainment business. “We’re trying to price ourselves like other leisure activities,” Dufour says.

Mont Saint-Sauveur sells day and half-day tickets to the two areas, as well as single-ride tickets for the dryland activities. It is doing more Internet and targeted, niche marketing.

Dufour and other resort officials attend the International Attractions and Amusement Park show in Orlando, Fla., every year (for SAM’s report, see “IAAPA,” page 54) looking for new attractions to add to its summer operation. “We’re concentrating more and more on making the season longer, rather than just being here in the winter,” Dufour says.


Where the Growth Is

Resorts are sure to discover more pricing strategies, combination packages, and other creative pricing strategies for summer as this becomes a bigger part of the business. Winter is still king, but summer holds greater potential for growth.

“For sure, the winter season is far and away the bigger part of our revenue,” Dufour notes. The breakdown is about 600,000 visitors in the winter and 200,000 in the summer. But that means summer has room to grow. “As we become more inventive and diversify our product, our summer market will increase,” he says.

Pettigrew agrees. “Winter is far and away the bigger season. We do about 15 percent of our business in the summer, compared to 85 percent in the winter. From a revenue standpoint, summer is an attractive business.”

He also says summer is where the growth potential lies for ski resorts. “It’s about adding activities and things summer customers might want to do,” he says. “There’s still a lot of opportunity there. In the winter, you’re still talking about skiing and snowboarding. The growth is definitely flat for winter.”

That summer growth has already occurred at some resorts. Seven Springs hosts about 1.2 million visitors annually, almost equally split between its summer and winter operations. “It used to be top-heavy winter,” Moser says. “Now it’s about equal.” Of course, the winter operation lasts just a bit longer than three months, compared to nine months for the “off-season” activities. Summer and winter attendance is also about equal at Camelback/Camelbeach, although winter revenues are still much higher than in the summer.

As the number of summer and nonski activities and visitors grows, and as resorts refine and expand their pricing and marketing strategies, the gap between winter and summer is likely to shrink.