Well we are  enjoying  another good weekend’s  skiing at Cairn Gorm and with lots of snow around at all five areas , queues  on the uplift have been very reasonable.  Last year we didn’t experience a full week end’s skiing throughout the whole winter and for the first time ever our lower lifts were unable to operate at any time due to lack of snow.   Although that was unprecedented, the secret of Scottish skiing is to enjoy it whilst the snow is here – who knows how long it will last?  Obviously the week ends are busier than during the week, and just now we have excellent opportunities for mid week skiing. During the week different ski areas have different policies about what they open; at Cairn Gorm our policy is to provide uplift for skiers to be able to access as much snow as possible. In practice this means that if it is possible to ski down the Ciste Gulley we will always endeavour to open the West Wall poma (subject to weather of course). In Scotland for some reason people tend to think of the amount of skiing available by the number of uplift offered rather than the length of run and the amount of snow that can be accessed, but that’s only really relevant when ther are big queues.   

 It’s also possible to get some really good value skiing. At Cain Gorm we currently sell 3 and 7 day vouchers which can be exchanged for tickets at any time of the season, and don’t have to be used concurrently. This means a day’s skiing even at the week end can be as cheap as £21.50. In the comments of the previous Blog it was suggested that it would be worth expanding on our commitment to skiing and the core lifts policy as part of the main Blog and therefore for those interested I have written below the basis of our current strategy.   

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 centers 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 work 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 analyzed 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). One factor 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 and  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 ensuring 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 Tbar, 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– an investment 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 were in a position where 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 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

   

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 11:09 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.