Don’t Go Intrawest, Young Man

August 13th, 2006 at 07:25am Michael Conniff 2

It’s easy to slam Intrawest Corp., so I am going to start out by saying what I like about the company. From a corporate standpoint, they seem capable of accomplishing exactly what they set out to do—and the nice premium from Friday’s sale announcement is no doubt richly deserved.

In the last decade or so, Intrawest has also seemed more than capable of bringing order to an unseemly skiing development scene, and it’s not unusual for the company to ride to the rescue of a faltering development. Their deal to develop Snowmass Base Village with Aspen Skiing Company is a case in point. Without Intrawest’s remarkable formula for profitable development, SkiCo would be skiing in slush on the last day of the season. As it is, the Intrawest-SkiCo combo finally gleaned the approvals to move ahead earlier in 2006. And Intrawest has pulled this off time and again, perhaps most notably with Mount Tremblant in Quebec, Canada, a ski resort that was faltering before the big guns from Vancouver, British, Columbia, took over. Now Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, once mainstays in Snowmass, have a place there.

So there’s a lot to like about Intrawest—particularly from a business standpoint. I would recommend their stock even as I decry their development philosophy. Here’s why: if there’s any company in the world that represents the victory of developers over skiers, that company is Intrawest.

They can’t be blamed for a big part of that accusation. Real estate makes the skiing world go round: while skier/snowboarder visits stay flat, real estate related to nearby slopes is a huge business. Without the financial adrenaline supplied by Base Village in Snowmass, for example, SkiCo had all but said any additional future development on the mountain was going to stop cold. You can’t disconnect the skiing and snowboarding from all those condos.

But I can take issue with the result: tightly-packed condominiums and retail space that crams the skiing experience down your throat. Forgive my nostalgia for the old skiing towns like Aspen, Telluride, and Crested Butte in Colorado; or even Jeffersonville, Vermont, home to Smuggler’s Notch, my old home mountain. Skiing that literally grew up out of the town has an authenticity that the new resorts don’t even try to embrace.

And that’s my problem with the whole Intrawest thing. Their developments remind me of baseball before The Ballpark at Camden Yards in Baltimore brought the notion of nostalgia back to The Show. Before Camden Yards, new ballparks like Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were cylindrical, symmetrical, and without soul. Then along came luxury boxes and the notion that you could marry going to the ballgame with corporate finesse.

The Intrawest-style developments represent the luxury boxes of skiing: the high-end experience that makes the bleachers possible given today’s mountainous economics. But what I’d love to see is a development company that learns from the baseball model that nostalgia actually sells in the real world of sports. Instead of faux Austrian villages I’d pay money to see developments that actually pay homage to the idea that skiing grew organically in the United States from the soul of those first ski towns. There’s a light to like about Intrawest, but that would give us something to love.

Entry Filed under: Resorts, Travel, Colorado, Canada, Whistler-Blackcomb, California, Snowmass, Ski Business, Smuggler's Notch, Lake Tahoe, Resort Management, Fractional Post, Squaw Valley, Copper Mountain, Mammoth Mountain, Mount Tremblant, Winter Park, Panorama Mountain Village, Snowshoe Mountain, Blue Mountain