The cycle of weather continues with good snow followed by periods of warm weather, and/or strong winds. It’s a bit like a game of snakes and ladders – but I have to say this year we do seem to be making our way steadily up the board, as each freeze-thaw consolidates the snow in the gullies and we still have good skiing down to the CAS car park. We made the most of Saturday when temperatures were minus 10 at the top, although we had a lot of work to do just to clear the car parks, keep the road clear and get the lifts back on after the storm – not to mention de-icing some of the tows.  The combination of wind and low temperature gave us a problem with our access road - in the end we had to close earlier than we would have liked. Sunday and Monday were lost to wind and rain, even at the top of the CAS - but it was back to snow and low temperatures yesterday which has resulted in the most popular mid-week day this season. We still have an excellent base for half term which starts on Friday and goes on to about the 24th February. This is traditionally our busiest time for skiers.   

Those in the marketing business will understand the concept of over-marketing i.e. when you can not deliver the product that is being promoted. This is a dilemma for all Scottish ski areas when marketing and promoting snowsports opportunities.  We often come under criticism for either over-marketing or under- marketing; once again it comes down so much to that unmanageable factor - the rapidly changing weather conditions.  We cannot manage the weather, but we try to manage the service and we continually look for ways of ensuring everyone has a positive experience. We do receive a lot of customer feedback which is really helpful. We often get positive and negative comments on the same day – so much of the experience depends on a chain of events all working well.   

At Cairn Gorm our snowsports marketing strategy is based on trying to provide as much accurate information as possible, keeping this updated in various forms for visitors on-site and off-site.  In this way expectations of a blue sky powder day (which we do get occasionally) can be kept realistic. The web site is increasingly important and we try to update this as early as possible as well as throughout the day. Ceefax is another useful point of information. Recorded messages on the phones are also an option, particularly when we are busy as often all operators are serving customers on site. We will always try and put photos on the site to show people what he conditions are like and web cams also help – but sometimes they don’t show the best angles and can put people off. Often looking up from Aviemore is deceptive – thin white lines on the runs suggesting not much skiing when the skiing can be excellent. If there were trees between the runs rather than  rocks it would give a totally different impression. We invested in electronic road signs to provide updates and monitors and boards on the hill. However we have learned from bitter experience that signage does not always work and the best way to manage the influx of numbers at the start of the day is to have people on hand to direct customers appropriately. Many of these are volunteer ambassadors, who do a great job supporting Scottish skiing in this way.  Having committed to providing this detail (which people expect these days) it only takes one change not to be updated, on one system, for the information chain to break down. We are constantly chasing internally to try and ensure this does not happen, but the reality is that it still does from time to time.Tomorrow the forecast is back into double figures (back down a snake), but hopefully the next ladder is a long one and just around the corner! 

 Bob   

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 3:48 pm 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.