ASPEN — The Aspen Skiing Co. doesn’t expect to recover the skier visits lost during the 2008-09 season this coming winter, according to its top two executives.
Aspen Skiing president and chief executive Mike Kaplan and senior vice president David Perry said the ongoing economic turmoil makes it unlikely that the company will improve its numbers from last season.
The company racked up 1.36 million skier-visits last season, a decrease of 7.6 percent from the season before.
“Frankly, if we had flat business levels this coming winter to last winter, it would be OK,” Perry said. “We wouldn’t be surprised by that. It would be a reasonable outcome.”
Kaplan said forecasts are nearly impossible right now. Numerous large companies have stopped issuing income projections, even though they have staffs dedicated to the chore, he noted. Destination resorts such as Aspen and Snowmass have the added disadvantage of losing one of their prime business indicators — advance reservations.
Resorts could foretell business with a high degree of certainty between 2005 and fall 2008 — when the economy was humming along — because travelers made advance commitments. That all changed in mid-September. Reservations ceased when the fiscal crisis took hold in mid-September, then bounced back a little bit from December through February.
By and large, the recreation-travel business has been forced to rely on last-minute bookings, which frays the nerves of business managers.
Perry expects that advance reservations in September, October and November will be stronger than last year but not as strong as two years ago. He acknowledged that no business, let alone destination resorts, can make reliable forecasts at this point.
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