Ski Trip '09

I just got back from my annual ski trip this weekend. Although I live in Tennessee, I still go out with the Ski Club of Sarasota. This marked my nineteenth year of going skiing with the club. This year I went on one of the trips organized by the Florida Ski Council. The Council puts together several trips a year where all of the member clubs send a contingent. This allows the Council to pool the buying power of the various clubs, and negotiate a better deal from the ski area.

This year’s trip was to Snowmass, a resort located near Aspen.

Now, the thing about skiing is that after you schuss down the hill, you have to spend about seven to ten minutes riding the ski lift back up the hill. Since you get on the lift in the order in which you reach the bottom of the run, the people who ride up with you are a pretty random assortment of the people who are skiing that day.

It is very quiet on the lift, so I kill time by yakking with my fellow passengers. It was an interesting cross section of Americans, with more than a few Australians thrown in. A couple of quick impressions were formed:

A ski vacation to a destination resort like Snowmass is an expensive undertaking. With everything in, from airport parking and baggage charges down to the $23 cheeseburger lunch on the mountain, I dropped about $2000 per person for the trip. In tough economic times, you would expect a big ticket discretionary expense like a ski vacation to be dropped by a lot of people. Anecdotally, this appeared to be the case, as a number of my fellow travelers noted the complete lack of lift lines. This was confirmed by one property manager I rode up with, as he told me bookings in the properties he managed were off by over 30%.

Counterintuitively, this same property manager told me that some of the owners he represented were turning down low-ball offers to rent houses. These owners would turn down valid offers at below the listed rental rate, preferring to take themselves out of the market before they cut their price. I can only conclude that represents either A) a failed negotiation: the owners who turned down the offer will wish they had accepted it when no other offers come along; or B) the owners do not care if their property is drawing an income or not.

Since houses in the Aspen area sell for millions of dollars, proposition B supposes that there is a significant population of owners who can afford to park millions of dollars of equity into property that they only use a few weeks out of the year.

I’m in the wrong line of work!