Getting more skiers into corner offices at airlines around the country just may increase the chances of getting more flights into ski resorts, according to one tourism leader.
Stay Aspen/Snowmass president Bill Tomcich said during a Mountain Travel Network telephone briefing Tuesday, “When you have a senior executive at a major airline who is a skier or has seen great success in ski markets, it’s very likely they’re going to be more willing to take risks and experiment with new routes.”
Airline executive Bob Cortelyou, for example, helped start more flights to ski destinations at Continental Airlines, Tomcich said, and then moved to Delta Air Lines and did the same thing. Tomcich said some of those flights at Continental have disappeared since Cortelyou left, and now Delta has been expanding its flights to ski destinations with Cortelyou as senior vice president of network planning.
“Bob even has a nickname,” Tomcich said. “He’s such an avid skier, the folks around there call him Bob Cortelluride.”
Northwest Airlines was “a real pioneer of nonstop ski routes” in the 1990s under then-chief executive John Dasburg, who was building a home at Snowmass, Tomcich said. Many of the routes have since been canceled, Tomcich said.
Santa in space
Space technology promoters are getting a boost from Santa Claus. The Colorado Springs-based Space Foundation has named the North American Aerospace Defense Command Santa Tracker Program a Certified Space Imagination Product.
“NORAD has the excellent technology to track Santa,” said NORAD Tracks Santa project officer Stacia Reddish in a written statement.
NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command, have tracked Santa for more than 50 years, starting after a Colorado Springs Sears Roebuck & Co. store advertisement in 1955 listed the wrong telephone number for children to call Santa, according to the Space Foundation.
The NORAD Tracks Santa Program is managed by the NORAD and U.S. Northern Command public affairs office at Peterson Air Force Base
Holiday procrastination
If you’re fretting over the few shopping days left until Christmas, you’re not alone.
More than a third of Americans, 35 percent, did not expect to have started their holiday shopping until a week or less before Christmas, according to a Consumer Reports phone survey released Tuesday.
Meanwhile, 24 percent said they wouldn’t be finished until at least Sunday and 5 percent expected to have gift-shopping all wrapped up after Dec. 25.
The survey, done by the Consumer Reports National Research Center Dec. 6-9, also found that the average shopping bill is expected to be $763 this year, and 76 percent of shoppers will be shopping for themselves.
Among those surveyed, 52 percent said they were able to get last year’s Christmas bills paid off by the end of January 2007. But a third were still paying off holiday debts in March — or later.
