Colorado ski resorts set record for visitors
Jun 12, 2014, 11:47am MDT Updated: Jun 12, 2014, 2:06pm MDT
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Winter Park base
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Jake DeGroot | Wikimedia
Skiers and snowboarders gather at the bast of Winter Park Ski Resort in Winter Park, Colorado.
Ed Sealover
Reporter- Denver Business Journal
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See correction at end of article.
Colorado's ski resorts welcomed a record 12.6 million visitors during the recently completed ski season as they recovered from two consecutive years of poor snowfall, the Colorado Ski Country USA trade group reports.
That number topped the previous record of 12.56 million visitors that the state's 25 resorts attracted in 2006-07 and is up 10 percent from the 2012-13 season.
Colorado Ski Country president/CEO Melanie Mills called the record “exciting” as she announced the figures Thursday at her organization’s annual meeting.
Mills attributed the growth to the huge increase in snowfall that resorts experienced. Snowfall totals were up 46 percent from 2012-13 and were just below the 10-year average for the state.
The key to their success in attracting visitors was capitalizing on late-season snow in 2013 and continuing the momentum built up from that by playing up early-season precipitation this season that continued throughout the winter, she said.
“It was kind of the perfect snowstorm this year. It started snowing early and it kept snowing,” Mills said. “We feel very positively about the season and about the momentum we’ve established.”
The skier numbers released by Colorado Ski Country are for all Colorado mountain resorts, including those operated by Vail Resorts Inc. that are not members of the trade group, Ski Country communications director Jennifer Rudolph said. Vail Resorts operates Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge and Keystone ski areas.
Colorado Ski Country member resorts alone saw 7.1 million skier visits during the 2013-14 season.
The record numbers come just two years after Colorado suffered through one of its worst seasons in history in 2011-12 — a season in which skier visits fell to their lowest numbers in 21 years because of near-record dry conditions.
Mills said her organization increased its marketing investments both domestically and internationally after the close of last season, hoping to capitalize on the first big snow that had fallen in years.
As a result, skier visits rose across the board from Coloradans, from destination visitors throughout the U.S. and from international visitors, she said.
Specifically, Colorado resorts got a bump in residents coming from the northwest United States and from the West Coast, where snowfall conditions were abnormally low, Mills said. There also was a small dip in visitors from the Midwest, which had especially cold and snowy conditions, she said.
The record number of visitors came despite significant challenges created by the increasing traffic on Interstate 70 that likely drove down the number of visitors that could have come to many resorts, Mills said.
Colorado Ski Country officials are working with the Colorado Department of Transportation and hope to see “a more robust discussion of some limited truck restrictions on the I-70 corridor,” she said.
The new record also came during a time when Colorado was in the center of the national media eye for its legalization of retail marijuana. Colorado Ski Country armed members with facts about the law and spent a lot of time educating the public that there would be no smoking allowed on the ski slopes. In the end, officials don’t believe the law had any effect, either negative or positive, on the state, she said.
“We think the snow was the story of the season,” Mills said. “We don’t have any data on whether marijuana encouraged or discouraged visitation.”
