XC ski center: viable business?

On Dec 10, 4:13*am, Anders wrote:
On Dec 9, 10:50*pm, "

wrote:
So it's ~$420,000 for 300K of trail. Where did this number come from,
do you have the source? Is it the cost of fuel, and groomer/trail
maintenance, and groomers' salary, while the land is municipal, i.e.
no rent/lease involved? Also, I bet the price does not scale down with
the trail length linearly. I.e. 30K of trail would not be $420,000
divided by 10.

The numbers come fromhttp://www.funasdalen.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&i...

Is is first said that it is a lot of money and that it is spent on
"clearing and preparing tracks and setting up signs", but later in the
text it is said that "apart from the cost of grooming, there is
maintenance, huts, bridges, signs, maps and lease to land owners that
must be financed" and that it all comes to three million per year

I would indeed imagine that most of the land is indeed municipal (and/
or state-owned, which is why the Swedish Environment Protection Agency
would come in with some say in whether track fees are okay or not) and
that the rent is "negotiable" (due to the jobs and increased tax
revenue etc).

The cost of one hour of grooming - one man, one machine, salary,
social security fees, fuel, maintenance and depreciation all included,
I suppose - is given as 900 SEK.

Anders

the ski areas that I have been to in NH that seem successful
definitely make profits on attached or nearby lodging, food service
and rentals/sales. .XC skiers are super hungry so to not serve food at
a ski center, is not just bad economics; it is crazy. Also, the non
skiing or barely skiing friends/relatives are highly likely to sit by
a fire and eat stuff. Even though skiing is seasonal, there are
possibilities for use by school groups, teams, etc. Also, the XC is
usually near downhill and snow mobile trails so that you get some
cross over of activities. There might also be skating, sauna, indoor
pool, other retail. Then, in the non-ski season, there is probably use
as hiking/ bike trails or golf/fishing. Sometimes the "center" groomed
trails are adjacent to public land or public access trails so
motivated skiers can "go further" maybe beyond the resort area if they
chose to do so. I think because of the economy, last year was bad in
general for travel/tourism so that may have hurt marginal places and
some people may have chosen to only go to free parks or places near
home rather than go some where distant and pay trail fees..

On Wed, 2 Dec 2009 18:16:05 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

As a spin-off of the thread on Salmon Hills, purely out of curiosity,
- is running a XC ski center a viable business model at all? What %
of XC ski start-ups make it through the first ~5 years? The 2 places
I've skied at (and love skiing at) that on the surface looked like
successful businesses are Royal Gorge, CA (which rumors say was
supposed to have been sold to a housing developer had it not been for
the current housing crisis) and Lapland Lake, NY.


How about an indoor year round ski center, say maybe in southern NY? :-)

Ben