KillingtonZone.com

I just happened across this. Not sure if it's ever been posted before.


1997-2006 skier visit figures include Pico

Killington Resort spokespeople (i.e. Marketing) continue to deny that they lost that many visits their first year.

Bubba wrote:Killington Resort spokespeople (i.e. Marketing) continue to deny that they lost that many visits their first year.

Who continues to deny what
The post shows 2006-2007 as the last year with 700k visits.
Was that not ASC last year Powdr came in May of 2007.
Their first year would of been 2007-2008 and I don't see that season in the chart.

jimbolla wrote:

Bubba wrote:Killington Resort spokespeople (i.e. Marketing) continue to deny that they lost that many visits their first year.

Who continues to deny what
The post shows 2006-2007 as the last year with 700k visits.
Was that not ASC last year Powdr came in May of 2007.
Their first year would of been 2007-2008 and I don't see that season in the chart.

Don't let the facts get in the way of a good bashing.

jimbolla wrote:

Bubba wrote:Killington Resort spokespeople (i.e. Marketing) continue to deny that they lost that many visits their first year.

Who continues to deny what
The post shows 2006-2007 as the last year with 700k visits.
Was that not ASC last year Powdr came in May of 2007.
Their first year would of been 2007-2008 and I don't see that season in the chart.

You are correct, and I misread the dates on the chart, however, since the official ASC final year (06 - 07) skier visit number that was published was 795,000, it looks like something may be wrong with the chart.

Looks like '61-'62 was a pretty slow season
Then there were Glory Days !
Perhaps they went 'the way of all things' in 2007 ?

In 1961-1962 how many lifts did Killington have? I think there were 5 lifts: Snowdon upper and lower pomas, Glades poma, Highline poma, and Killington chair. (i think Snowdon double chair was installed in summer of 1962 along with Snowshed 1 and Rams Head double chairs). Divide that by no more than 95 skier days - Dec 15 - Apr 1. There was no snowmaking, so how many days was that season? Midweek, the mountain was probably deader than a door nail, so the crowds were on the weekends. Probably no more than 8 busy weekends and maybe 7 holiday weekdays. So, that's 23 busy days. That's about 5000 skiers per busy day. Poma lifts have a capacity of 300 per hour, and the double chair 720 per hour. So Killington's uphill capacity was under 2000 skiers per hour. That means lift waits averaged between 15 and 20 minutes (you must factor in that the crowd filtered in in the morning, and filtered out in the later afternoon). At peak times, Killington back then had never less than a 30 minute wait for the double chair during busiest times of a weekend day. COMPARE THAT WITH THE AVERAGE WAIT TO RIDE A KILLINGTON LIFT TODAY.

Since I now believe Killington stock is not publically traded, I don't believe they are required to post this data. In fact, if Pdr is a "private corporation" their tax returns aren't subject to public scrutiny. So we may never know, nor are we entitled to know such things as their true profit, their real cost of operation, and their skier visits.

I'm curious about the figures from the late 90's, if they include Pico or not. I thought in the mid-early 90's Killington was doing about 1M alone.

Highway Star wrote:I'm curious about the figures from the late 90's, if they include Pico or not. I thought in the mid-early 90's Killington was doing about 1M alone.

You might have missed: "1997-2006 skier visit figures include Pico". '93 to '97 numbers are missing.

I did some number crunching on curiosity. From the historical tables I calculated the number of operating days. Then plotted operating days vs skier visits. I'm sure other factors come into play - price of gas, state of the economy, snowfall that year. But the trend is interesting.
The X axis isn't scaled correctly, (The software I used didn't allow that ability, and it's not like I'm getting paid for this) but I'm not sure that detracts from the relationship.
To compare to how the rest of the State did, look at the chart between the blue lines. The season ending '07 was down 11% from the mean of 4.3 Million, but otherwise it was fairly uniform throughout the period. I can't see where the State trend was changing to the extent Killington did. Not that this is any new revelation here, just expressed graphically with numbers this time.

wow, its almost like the more days you stay open, the more skier visits you have

My rough math shows about 5,000 daily skier visits to Killington for the ASC years shown above. The last few years of POWDR show a number closer to 4,000/day if you assume POWDR's skier visit numbers of about 700K a season. If those numbers have in fact dwindled to closer to 600K a season, daily skier visits are down closer to 3,500/day. 1,500 of 5,000 is a 30% drop in skier visits. 1,000 of 5,000 is a 20% drop in skier visits. The season is shortened, but less and less skiers are coming on a daily basis as well.

Thats good!
Less crowded for the rest of us!