Taking the Show on the Road

It's currently Presidents Week, typically the busiest week of the season for the snow sports business. Most schools in the nation are on holiday for the week celebrating the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and a lot of people take that time to ski and ride with their families. Okemo is a busy place under normal circumstances and during Presidents Week it can be a bit nutty. Those of us who work there gear up for this week as though it were the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Olympics, and the World Cup all rolled into one. It may be nuts, but when we are prepared for it, we do our jobs well and our guests are in a great state of mind, it's a whole lot of fun.

Okemo and Vermont generally have had some very difficult weather conditions to contend with this week, so it's definitely been a test of everyone's mettle. Thankfully, our snowmaking and grooming continue to amaze everyone, guests and staff alike, and the resort has fared pretty well considering. At least that's what people have been telling me. I'm not there.

I'm in Colorado, working for a spell at Okemo's "little sister" resort, Crested Butte. Together with a couple of colleagues, I'm working with some guests that I normally ski with this week at Okemo. It was time for an adventure, and we're very glad to have had the opportunity to provide one for them here in the Rockies.

Crested Butte is quite a different place from Okemo in many, many ways. The mountain is big, steep, snowy, far from any metropolitan area, a true destination resort, and definitely culturally a part of the American West. But one thing has become crystal clear: after several years of ownership by the family that also owns Okemo and operates Sunapee, the guest service here has taken on a remarkably familiar tone and a thoroughness that we refer to as "the Okemo Difference". Our resorts do not hire guest service consultants, we do not subscribe to some pre-engineered method of training our people, we do not hard-sell our guests, we do not have a script that we follow, and we do not have a scientific prescription. What we do have is an ability to create an environment where guests and staff alike enjoy being in our resorts, where we genuinely are happy to share our places with those that travel to experience them, and where we are comfortable enough in our roles and our places that we can greet people and take care of them with informality, sincerity and attention to detail. It helps that we hire carefully and staff our resorts with some wonderful, hard-working and dedicated folks, and that's certainly been our impression here at Crested Butte.

It's wonderful to experience these similarities while on the road. Given my role here, I really am an "internal guest", as the expression goes. Everyone here on the 'normal' staff at Crested Butte has gone out of their way to make my colleagues and me feel at home and welcome. It's awesome to see and experience this consistency of tone from one place to another, and it certainly is making our stay here, and our guests experience here, a great one. It helps that we've had lots of fresh, dry, powder snow followed by deep, blue, cloudless skies and that the terrain here is absolutely fantastic. I'll be here for another week, and I intend to savor every last bit of it before heading back to the familiar confines in Vermont. It's just great to take our show on the road and see that it really is the best in the business.