No buses
Below is a photograph of the bus park at Cairn Gorm on Saturday 12th January. Yes, this is 
the bus park but there are no buses, only cars. This has been a trend over recent years, but it’s the first busy week-end when we have had no ski coach business at all - a sign of the times. At its peak in the 1980’s, it was not an unusual site to see 40 coaches; I have heard stories of up to 70 coaches as a record , maybe someone out there knows? What is significant about this is that coach business has been replaced by private cars, often only carrying one or two people. This means that on those few very busy days parking space becomes the critical factor. With both the Cas and Ciste car parks full, our capacity is between 2,500 and 3,000 skiers, rather than around 5,000 in the past. To put this in perspective this was never an issue last year and only once or twice over each of the previous five seasons. This has therefore been a major consideration in the strategic decisions on how we manage our area to try and provide the best ski experience and maintain a sustainable business model.
We have received lots of positive comments about the week-end – thank you. The comments about the attitude of the staff are particularly welcome. Although the rain on Sunday was a disappointment for skiers and boarders, it has meant that our snow is now well consolidated in the gullies all the way to the car park and with fresh snow forecast it should mean we can keep the base and have good skiing conditions for a while yet. Not everything went to plan at the week-end, the web-site became so popular at the end of last week that it crashed – great, just what we did not need. We are now working on upgrading to avoid this problem in future. On Thursday the M1 motor died, another potential disaster, but we managed to replace this in 24 hours, although this in turn delayed other preparations for the week-end and meant the West Wall poma opening was delayed. The main belt for our road gritter also broke on Friday and we are very grateful to Highland Council for sending their plough and gritter up to help. On a more positive note the new web cam now seems to be updating.
The skiing remains good and our policy is to continue to provide uplift to be able to ski and board as much as the ski area as possible.
January 16th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Bob, I well remember the late 70s and early 80s when there were coach loads coming up to the hill. I myself used to come with my school on the Saturday and the Moray Ski Club on the Sunday, both days in coaches. I can remember the lower car park in the Cas being full of buses (with the odd reindeer in between!) but I never counted them I’m afraid. I can well believe there might have been 70 coaches on some days though!
Great to see the current superb conditions on the hill, I was up on Sunday after a day at Nevis on Saturday, but despite the conditions had a fantastic time as did most of the party of people from England with me. I have strong disagreements with the direction CML is going and have been angered by the incremental loss of uplift on the mountain, which contrasts with other Scottish ski areas, but I have to say your staff and the atmosphere on the hill was fantastic and helped to make it a very memorable day so thank you to all.
January 17th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Roger - thanks for your comments, I think it is worth explaining exactly what our strategy is in relation to ski uplift
Scottish Ski areas face a number of challenges these days and real vision is required to ensure the best chance of offering skiing in the medium/long term future. Further investment will be required to update an aging uplift infrastructure and the ski centres will need to future proof against the potential impact of climate change. Of course no one can predict accurately what sort of winters we are likely to experience, but all indications, even taking into account this winter, fit into the patterns that have been well publicized about what’s happening to our climate. That’s not to say we won’t have good winters and good skiing in future, I am sure we will, but we would be burying our head in the sand if we thought we could just sit back and wait for the right weather patterns rather than pro actively working on a sustainable business model.
At Cairn Gorm we take this challenge very seriously and we intend to be around to offer skiing in the future. In 2004 we analysed the size of the ski market, looked at future trends and other factors and decided to rationalise some of the area to concentrate on what is called “the core lift policy”. This was always going to be controversial, particularly in a good winter, but it is based on sound strategic thinking. The first factor was the size of the market. On Cairn Gorm this is between 2,000-3,000 skiers. In the old days it was around 5,000(remember the 9 lines on the Lady- on a busy week end -you would be lucky to get half a dozen good runs). Another of the factors is the parking capacity. We also took demographic and behavioral changes into account. We then carried out an analysis of the previous 20 years frequency of uplift use, including wind tolerance of lifts. We concluded that we could offer access to 90% of the whole ski area (with exception of the lower Aonach and lower Ciste down to Ciste car park) from a set of core lifts. These lifts included the White Lady Tbar but not the Day Lodge poma. We trialed this for one season and then put the Day lodge poma back in to the core lifts, taking account of our own operational review and customer feedback.
We know with the right conditions we can still provide some of the best skiing in Scotland with minimal queuing for most of the time. The problem comes at the very busy weekends, of which we have had very few in recent years- for example we never parked in the Ciste once last year. We have actually had around 600 trading days since the last time we had to park in the Ciste. We do know that on a busy weekend the queues remain very reasonable once skiers are away from the car parks. Our main challenges at weekends include processing people through the system in the first place as fast as possible and making sure we minimize down time on the lifts. We continue to work hard at addressing these issues as well as trying to improve our service in general. Last weekend very much confirmed that this is generally working, with very reasonable queues and a lot of positive feedback from customers.
Our strategy to create a sustainable business model also includes continued diversification, we have a vibrant trade all year round, BUT skiing remains an integral and important part of this and there are no plans to rationalise the skiing infrastructure any further, far from it, we will continue to invest in this aspect of the business. This strategy has strengths and weaknesses from a single skiing agenda perspective, but fundamentally we believe it is the best option we have, in order to secure skiing on Cairn Gorm in future.
To clarify the position of the White Lady lift, this has always been one of our core lifts which we planned to maintain /upgrade – we put a new rope on it two years ago and changed the gear box– both evidence of investment of time and money. We simply had such a bad year last year and such a major catastrophic safety failure that we could not fix it for this season. The White Lady remains an integral core lift and we hope that it can be reinstated when finances permit, (but not this season).
Making any modifications or moving lifts is becoming increasingly expensive and bureaucratic. We have looked at numerous options, but before we do make further improvements we will need to weigh up where limited resources will have the best impact on the skiing side of the business. In the event that we did get into a position that the business generated enough return from skiing that we could consider major infrastructure investment, we would probably look to replace some of the aging infrastructure with fewer, strategically placed, high capacity uplift.
I hope this helps to clarify the core lifts policy and reassures our skiing customers of CML’s commitment to skiing. I welcome the constructive debate about what we should do and we are always open to ideas and feedback.
Bob
January 18th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Thanks for the eloquent defence of CMLs policies
I don’t want to enter a lengthy debate here about the whole situation but my original point stands that your policies run counter to those of the other ski areas. Time will tell who has the correct policies but for all the talk of climate change I am led to believe that The Lecht is the most profitable and highest performing ski area in Scotland, it is also happens to be the lowest!
I know that you have faced difficult circumstances and choices but the current situation is shrinking your snowsports market incrementally - just look at the numbers at Glenshee and The Lecht over the past couple of weeks in comparison with Cairngorm.
Now, back in the days of 70 odd buses (and reindeer wandering the carpark) to read such figures would have been unbelievable, these days it’s no surprise whatsoever I’m afraid.
Lastly I say bring back the reindeer!
January 18th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
That should be a blog post on its own bob! Thanks for the update, and good to see the DLP is going to run tomorrow!
January 19th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Bob,
Regarding the catering capacity issue raised:
At Glenshee I noted that they set up a make-shift ’stall’ at the foot of Coire Fionn. Basically consisting of one member of staff, a money box, and a table with basic foods such as pre-packed sandwiches, bottles of water/drinks, chocolate bars, pies, sausage rolls, etc.
This had the advantage that - not only did it mean that skiers could avoid the crowded cafe’s and therefore ease congestion in those, but it was slopeside (’ski in, ski out’) which greatly added to convenience.
It would be relatively easy to set up something similar during busy days on CairnGorm, particularly in crowded areas - middle station would be perfect for this as due to the nature of the lift network it is a point where people naturally gather and wait around. Furthermore, being at mid-station the Funicular can easily drop off supplies whenever needed etc.
So therefore it’d be convenient, easy to do, and at Glenshee it seemed to be just what people needed. I’d guess that on a busy day it could push towards - or exceed - a 4 figure sum in profit which would do far more than cover the operating costs. Quite a reward for something relatively basic to set-up.
Ok so not the most stylish form of catering, but the skier’s wouldn’t mind as it means avoiding the queues in the Ptarmigan and Cas Bar, and it means they don’t have to go out of their way to be fed! I’d say also that you’d get custom from people that would otherwise not bother. It’s a far better option than having to make changes to the Cas Bar or Ptarmigan, and far far cheaper than having to operate the Shieling for only a few days each season.
All the best
January 20th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Thanks Jamie for your ideas. This weekend we have put in extra facilities in The Day Lodge. We have provided a basic refreshment stop in the Tbar- drinks and sandwiches (packed lunch area) and also stocked the shop with more refreshment and snack items. This helps a lot as it provides three different options, compared to one option only in the CAS bar. I will pass your thoughts onto the catering manager
Bob