Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everyone. I'm Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us. A couple of weeks ago, I went skiing, or at least attempted to ski, in Vermont. And I got curious about the economics behind the snow sports industry.
Turns out it's an industry in flux, and it's getting more expensive, both for new people who want to try to learn snow sports and for folks who've been doing it for a while. I heard about this a lot when I was talking to some folks on the ski hill.
Costs have been definitely going up. It makes family skiing with two young daughters a little bit tricky.
Yeah, I mean, if you get the passes that they do, multiple mountain passes, I think it's a little more affordable. But when you go for the day, you can spend close to $200 just for the ticket, never mind equipment and staying and eating and all that. Skiing is innately expensive, but it's so important to Vermont youth. You know, we have four or five months of winter, so I'm really happy.
It's worth the investment.
I do think the climate has taken a toll. I think that they're forced to make a lot of snow, which obviously costs more money.
Yes, climate change is one major factor affecting this industry. So to get smarter about all of this, I spoke with Daniel Scott while I was up in Vermont. He's a professor at the University of Waterloo, where he's an expert in sustainable tourism. We got into how the industry is changing and what that means for casual skiers in the U.S.
So first of all, are you a skier, snowboarder, winter sport extraordinaire?
It comes with the Canadian passport, yes, and then my wife's family is Austrian, so she gets double the skill level I do.
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Chapter 2: What factors are driving up the cost of snow sports?
Once the kids start flying past me, I'm just in catch-up mode.
Which one do you do?
We do ski, but yeah, Nordic ski, downhill, all the snow sports around here is sort of a way of life.
Okay. The cost of a ski trip in the U.S. has really shot up over the past decade. What are you seeing driving prices?
Yeah, that's happened in the entire North American market. And part of it's a bit of consolidation in the way some of the bigger resorts or resort conglomerates, they're buying up multiple resorts in different regions. And in part to get you to pay for your pass ahead of season. So you don't know what the weather is going to be like, but they get your money back.
to get those Icon or Epic passes, they price those lower so that those who ski frequently, you get a good deal. But if you're going one weekend, as you maybe just are, or you're going with the family for a one-day pass, those prices have really skyrocketed so that it's almost more value if you buy the pass. But many people, if you're only going once or twice a year, aren't willing to do that.
So that's made it really difficult for families and beginners just getting into skiing. It's something you're not going to commit yourself to. But in Europe, we haven't seen that same sort of market trend, so it's a bit different over there.
If you could explain this past system a little bit more, because I actually did run into a lot of people talking about this, and I'm a very beginner when it comes to snow sports, and I you know, was surprised at the cost of like the tickets to do it and the rental gear and everything like that.
But folks were complaining also that the passes, even if they may save you a little bit of money as a regular skier, it's contributed to, they were complaining about crowding on the slopes and you can't really determine the conditions. How do these pass systems work?
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Chapter 3: How does climate change affect the ski industry?
Many of those economic contributions are even more important because they're in smaller towns, remote areas that aren't a Boston or a New York, places that need those tourism dollars and that economic benefit.
So when they struggle, and we had that in Canada as one example around here and around Toronto a couple of years ago when ski areas couldn't get open around Christmas, they laid off 1,600 people. So, you know, that's like a small automotive plant or something closing, you know, that type of scale. And that really hurts a community and an economy.
And was it closing just from lack of snow, lack of business? What was happening?
No, yeah, Christmas, New Year's is massive importance to the entire ski industry. Some ski resorts make 25% of their revenues in that sort of period of time around those key holidays. And in that case, it was just, yeah, it was too warm to even make snow, which was a rarity. So they just couldn't get open. So they didn't need all that seasonal staff until they got the conditions to reopen.
So it was a temporary closure. And once things got cold again, they could pop back open again. But for a couple of weeks, they had to lay off you know, over 1,500 people.
How common is that? Because I heard from some of the more, you know, avid skiers on the Marketplace team who were talking to me ahead of this trip that, you know, out west here in the United States, a lot of the traditional ski places just didn't get snow this year. And I'm wondering, especially with, you know, the changes coming to the planet with climate change, how common is that?
Yeah, so this year was a bit of an anomaly, particularly for Salt Lake City. I just finished doing a lot of media related to some of the work we do for the International Olympic Committee on Climate Change and future hosts. And it was a real shock to them because many ski areas out west, Colorado, Utah, they want to be open for American Thanksgiving if possible, but certainly Christmas.
And they had a real snow drought this year. And so if they were hosting the Olympics this year instead of 2034, It would have been a bit more challenging than I think they anticipate. So luckily, that is an anomaly for them. So nine years out of 10, that's not the type of winter that we see when we did the analysis for Salt Lake City as an Olympic host. So hopefully this is their bad year.
And in 2034, they're going to get a good year. But It's kind of a sign of the times that those bad years or poor years are happening a bit more frequently. What we had seen over the last 40 years, average ski seasons across all five regional markets in the U.S. were getting longer from the 1980s to the 90s and again 2000s and again 2010s. Average ski seasons were getting longer.
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