It wasn’t just weak snow that pinched resort communities last winter. Rising fuel prices, airline woes and reticent vacationers forced resort towns like Steamboat, Telluride, Crested Butte and Vail to pay more to airlines for consistent flights into regional mountain airports.
This year, the guarantee payments remain steep, but a host of deals is fueling hopes that packed jets full of ski vacationers will fill resort coffers this winter. Some resort towns are working closely together to attract more airplane seats.
“We’ve been doing this for 25 years and we understand there will be ebbs and flows. Last year was an ebb but we have confidence this year will be more successful,” said Rob Perlman, the vice president of marketing at Steamboat ski area who last year at this time was celebrating the passage of a local sales and use tax to fund Steamboat’s airline guarantee program.
Steamboat this week announced a slew of discounted flights from 28 cities, including the eight cities that offer non-stop flights into Yampa Valley Airport. This year the program has fewer seats than last season – at 111,850 for the season, it’s one of the lower totals in the last decade – but the resort is marketing heavily in core markets like Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Houston to fill those direct flights.
Crested Butte and Telluride this season will share the cost of jet service into nearby Montrose Regional Airport, in a unique partnership. They extended their ties on Monday, announcing a six-visit pass good for three days at each hill.
“Regionalization is coming,” said Michael Marleton, chief of the Telluride Tourism Board, which joined Crested Butte Mountain Resort this fall on a $650,000 revenue-guarantee deal with Allegiant Air bringing twice-weekly flights from Oakland and Phoenix into Montrose all winter. “To the extent that we on this side of the divide can start to come together, we are are going to be able to do some great things.”
The Telluride-Montrose Regional Air Organization deal with Allegiant adds 10,000 incoming seats to the region and makes Montrose one of the few mountain airports with a bump in arriving seats for the winter.
Last year, Telluride needed gap funding to meet rising revenue guarantees for major airlines flying into Montrose. Without the additional $500,000 in funding, the number of arriving passengers was expected to drop by 25 percent, meaning 11,000 fewer visitors to Telluride and Montrose.
This year, Telluride-area tourism boosters again went knocking on doors, raising $650,000 to fund a revenue guarantee deal with Allegiant Air.
The Telluride-Montrose Regional Air Organization found a rare partner for the Allegiant Air program in Crested Butte Mountain Resort. While the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association and the Gunnison Valley Rural Transportation Authority declined to join the partnership, Crested Butte Mountain Resort saw the benefits of sharing flights into Montrose.
Crested Butte ski area pioneer Ralph Outlaw Walton forged the first-ever airline guarantee program at the Gunnison airport in 1985, triggering a now ubiquitous program across regional airports that serve ski areas. Today, about 45 percent of Crested Butte’s ski vacationers arrive through that airport, thanks to direct flights from Denver, Houston and Dallas. Last year the resort committed $1.7 million toward the airline guarantee program and this year the number of passenger seats arriving at the Gunnison airport is around 35,000. That compares to around 90,000 in the early 1990s.
The $399 pass deal with Telluride includes half-off discounts for passholders at each resort and works as a united front to counter the Winter Park-Copper Mountain-Steamboat team as well as the Vail Resorts Epic Pass front of Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Arapahoe Basin.
“I think we will see more partnership potential with more southwest Colorado resorts for sure,” said Crested Butte Mountain Resort’s head of marketing and sales, Scott Clarkson.
Aspen, with its four ski areas and spread of second homes, has never needed to guarantee airlines a certain level of revenue in order to lure consistent winter flights. Even so, Frontier’s departure from regional service left the Aspen airport with fewer seats incoming than last season. But the upwards of 1,600 seats a day — on 20 to 25 direct flights a day from Denver, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and San Francisco — keeps a steady stream of vacationers pouring into the Roaring Fork Valley.
Vail Resorts and community businesses in the Vail Valley are supporting 211,763 seats arriving at Eagle County Airport this season, with 10 daily flights and additional weekend flights arriving from nine cities.
The Eagle Air Alliance — a group of 30 to 40 Eagle County businesses — focuses mostly on spring, summer and fall flights, leaving Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas to carry most of the weight for winter flights, said Kent Myers, an Avon-based air travel consultant who works with the Eagle Air Alliance.
And summer is getting easier. American Airlines this summer dropped its need for a revenue guarantee to fly into Eagle. Still, Myers said, airline consolidation, changing airline fleets and rising fuel costs is elevating the bottom line of revenue guarantees.
“Eight, nine years ago, it cost half a million for a daily flight. Today, it’s a million,” said Myers, of the revenue guarantee for a season-long daily flight. “We are trying to expand into a larger funding group. We need to.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jasontblevins