The Bikeconomics (Mega)Thread

In college (decades ago) my roommates Dad owned Kelley's Ski Resort in Idaho. 

He told us  (his dad) on a river raft trip that "the big cost" for ski resorts was liability insurance, which is year round no matter what the summer operations are, so "might as well have a bike park" to keep the lifties employed and out of trouble. I'm still surprised there aren't more bike parks, even if they don't make as much.  

A little over 20 years ago, I had a staffer at Whistler tell me one in the winter equalled the entire summer revenue wise.. Curious if that's changed much..

I can see that at places like Snow Summit and Mountain High ( Who just announced that they are taking this summer off to play catch up on their plans for the bike park.), where Summit won't fill the main parking lot during the summer, but regularly sell out on lift tickets in the winter..

I guess the total number of lifts used summer vs winter could be an indicator..

Its kinda ironic that there are dedicated summer-only bike parks not at ski resorts that seem to make it work.

I wonder how viable it would be for a bike-park company to (sub)lease ski resorts to operate in the summer, so the ski resort itself doesn't have to worry about it. Essentially rent out their lower lifts to a subcontractor for summer operations.

I'm just speculating but if I were a resort operator I would be very skeptical of the long-term value of bike park operations with the growth of self-shuttling (e-bikes). 

Meh. I see a decent number of eebs going up lifts nowadays, but not many under who you'd think of as 'core' riders. It's just another segment to which they can cater. Ebikes aren't acutally a replacement for chairlifts in the major parks. A few years ago I rode an ebike up Sun Peaks (600m vert in bike park). If I went straight up in turbo, I'd get one lap at most. In the lesser modes, it would be at most 2 laps and certainly over an hour of climbing for those 2 laps. Compare that to the chairlift where the only limit is your stamina.

If I managed a bike park, I'd be concerned about how to broaden my experience to appeal to that kind of rider, because it is a growing segment. Maybe more "adventure" style trails where you take the lift up, get to experience the alpine, and then do a 70/30 descend/climb ratio trail that takes a super long time to get down to the bottom - bike parks generally don't have this as an option, and I think it would appeal to two untapped markets for bike parks - XC yuppies and ebikers. 

Remember, for most resorts in NA the bike park isn't a money maker in itself, but a vehicle to sell real estate and resort experience stuff. A bike park means summer traffic which means maybe more people to rent your condo out on air bnb over the summer (a selling feature!) and higher rent for all the businesses in resort-owned developments. If you can figure out a way to get ebike folks to come, even if they are 'self shuttling' your trails, it keeps traffic up where it matters and in a demographic with disposable income. 

E-bikers shuttling up in vehicles in the S2S (North Vancouver to Pemberton) is becoming commonplace. It could be that riders can only afford one bike and an e-bike ends up being the default purchase. It could also be because a certain demographic of riders fall into the instant gratification / low input-high reward category. This type of consumer really grew in the Covid era as their intro to the sport didn't come from the traditional "you must suffer to participate" origins that some came from. If the latter is the case, I don't see chairlift access demand going down anytime soon.

I could see something like this if both Bear Mountain and Snow Summit were open during the summer.. Take a chair up, ride the fire roads that connect the two, do some other laps and then ride back to your beginning park.. Especially if you are on a trial or enduro bike.. But, I don't see the numbers adding up for this to happen..

many years ago mt creek leased summer lift access to another entity, who ran it as diablo freeride park.  the mountain now operates the bike park itself. 

Lmao, your example of skiing on the Front Range is exactly what’s driven me to mountain biking.

I’ve had a really good ski season though this year since I’ve taken up park riding as of late and that’s much less condition dependent and everyone else has been staying home so traffic and lift lines are much more tolerable. 

I worry about our summer though, the snowpack is abysmal and it’s probably going to be very dry. Im used to riding dusty rocks but this will be so much more. 

> Maybe more "adventure" style trails where you take the lift up, get to experience the alpine, and then do a 70/30 descend/climb ratio trail that takes a super long time to get down to the bottom - bike parks generally don't have this as an option, and I think it would appeal to two untapped markets for bike parks - XC yuppies and ebikers. 

That's exactly how it's done in France/Italy/Switzerland.

I'm surprised to see it's not very common in (my limited exploration of) US bike parks.

One thing with Whistler, and I'm assuming others, is the pass and ticket price in summer compared to winter. And then there is the Epic/Ikon factor. Plus the passes sold for hiking and sight seeing. Throw in the cost of trail maintenance summer versus winter. If bike park passes and accommodations become equal in cost to ski season it could trigger a downturn also. So many things the decision makers have to look at. The $20 million that went into phase 1 at Red Mountain seems kind of crazy too. I dread this time of year wondering what the pass will cost after already committing to travel and accommodations.

I think it would be hard to increase the price of lift tickets to the same as ski tickets and still have a sizeable user base. I would cut my bike park days to 1-2 per season. Backcountry skiing takes so much more experience and is much more terrain limited than enduro style biking. Although backcountry skiing has exploded in recent years, beginners are mostly limited to resort skiing. Biking is the opposite, where pedal access trails are so accessible that beginners usually start under their own power, and are likely to continue to do so. In addition, skiing carries the social aspect, where some people just go for the Apres and the social status of going skiing. Most people mountain bike purely because it is an activity they enjoy, so the commercialization of bike parks and surrounding bars isn't the drawing feature. 

Not sure how it's done in North America or even other places in Europe, but at least here in Slovenia ski resorts aren't the owners of the land under the groomed slopes. So this is a major problem making bike parks, agreeing on land access. Grooming snow on a meadow is a whole different ballpark than making dirt canals in said meadow, doubly so when cows graze there in the summer.

As for ski resorts vs. bike park, skiing on-piste and riding bikes in a bike park aren't really analogues. When you take into account how technically demanding skiing is, it's a lot closer to road biking. Vice-versa for mountain biking, which is analogous to either freeriding (lift accessed powder runs vs. bikeparks) or ski touring (self powered trail riding & co.). A lot more 'normies' (I do not want to sound derogative here, definitely not my intention) ski vs. mountain bike like a lot more 'normies' ride road bikes vs. mountain bikes or even just ride around on pavement, regardless of the bike they're using it for. So there's the first problem, market size.

Even if bike park riding was something 'normies' did like they (us, really, I'm definitely in that spectrum skiing wise) do with skiing, it's not viable for bikeparks to handle the numbers ski slopes do. Ski slopes are wide, skiers are fairly fast (40+ kph easily on a somewhat steep slope), grooming is, for all intents and purposes, easy. You can't groom trails, not even blue ones, to the same order that ski slopes are. You can't make enough trails (heck, enough surface area) to ride with mountain bikes on the average mountain vs. what you can do ski slope wise, even if you didn't have land barriers that I mentioned above.

Yeah, there are bikepark specific lifts out there. Like there are freeriding, ungroomed only runs areas served by lifts out there for skiers. But by far the best hope for us, to ride bikeparks, is to piggyback off the existing infrastructure intended for other purposes - skiing, summer mountain tourism (tourists brought to the top with a gondola where they can take a picture or two), backcountry hiking access, etc. 

Grew up in Colorado, started skiing when I was five in the sixties, mountain biking in the early 80's. Was on board with lift served mtb in the late 80's when my home mountain, Winter Park, started up loading bikes to ride xc trails. Always enjoyed off piste, back/slack country skiing long before it became a thing. Didn't ski much for a couple decades, but have been doing a week the past couple years. Doing way more lift served mtb since the 2000's. Still love ski resorts summer and winter. It has certainly been interesting to watch things change, improve and grow with both sports, enjoy the similarities and think about the possibilities. Hope to continue to be able to throw money at these activities. Of course I love economics too!

Paragon Machine Works is gone. Very sad for the custom-built crowd, including all the thousands of people out there who are running their sliding dropouts. Those parts aren't going to come easy!

I personally have two bikes using PMW parts, although one of them is currently getting it's rear triangle redone. Perhaps I'll be asking for them to change from sliding dropouts to standard based on this announcement? 

Link to Radavist article

I had a really good chat with a friend of mine over dinner last night who is pretty involved in the industry. Knolly is not the only company that is getting called by the bank, but more haven't come up publicly yet. His take is that things are only just getting started. 

I want to chime in on the bikepark stuff..As someone who lives on Long Island NY, And have been a regular at Mountain Creek for the last 11 years..Even with a 4 hour average commute there and back..Mountain Creek has a BIG Waterpark going for them. So the food/Bar etc. Has to be open June 23 thru Labor day in Sept. They make money there. So to run the lift and pay a few extra people to be lift people is nothing compared to how much more beer and food they sell to the MTB peeps also. So they are 7 days a week open at that time. What makes me say WOW..Is Highland in New Hampshire. They have a lift running and do NO skiing!! The only place I have ever heard of that. So THEY can use every bit of that Mountain for bikes. That one is interesting. They are both icons in the east coast MTB world. And rightfully so. But such different business models.

I was shocked to hear this today, they are a framebuilding staple. I have a Chumba and a custom bike using them, I hope that someone steps in to make their sliders. I assume someone could in the same way Wheels MFG or Robert Axle Project make replacements for OEM axles and hangers. Serious blow, especially for American made.

Oh wow, that sucks! I have a custom frame with the sliding dropouts in 135 spacing and picked up a set of 142 a couple years after that worked perfectly right out of the box. PMW stuff is [was] incredibly well-designed. I am sorry to see them go.

Paragon passing on will be fine.  The .step files for hangers and dropout parts have been circulating online for a while.  There’s plenty of shops that can pick up those skus.

The first Paragon part i ever bought was a 72t x110 bcd chainring back in college for an Ebike project. The secret order menu over there was more extensive than In and Out Burger. 

As I’ve mentioned, domestic ti frame manufacturing is still viable as a commercial activity.  

The companies i know that build ti domestically go out of there way to differentiate their dropouts from paragon stock units, but Paragon did offer a great selection of ti headtubes that folks can use on their “cheaper” ($4k instead of $6k) frames.

If you ever been to creek in the winter it’s a total zoo.  I love mcbp and the waterpark is cool.  But their summer operations are still small time compared to the winter.  And I’d bet they make way more money on food and liquor with weddings in the summer than on mtbers.  

but their bike park is certainly successful on it’s own right.  And that just comes down to many years of being worth driving 2-4hrs one way for many season and multiple triple pass buyers.  And people stop from all around the world if they are in the area.  So props to them!   

Finally finished "The Greedheads Work Eight Days a Week," and as always it was a great read. It was interesting to read all of the long-term trends working against the Vail Resorts business model (stock by-backs, lack of reinvestment in capex, customer fatigue from Epic and Iconic overcrowding, etc) in light of the HORRIFIC snow season Vail properties have just endured. For a company that has been historically obsessed with quarterly numbers and habitually unwilling to look at their assets, employees, and customers with the long lens, it makes me wonder: what does the next 18 months look like for Vail Mountain, Whistler, Park City, or Crested Butte? What does it look like for all the small ski resorts in the midwest?

If they need to be profitable in the short term, how much will they cut? How much can they cut? I'm imagining the summer bike season from hell at Whistler after layoffs, pay freezes, hiring freezes, and deferring even more needed maintenance.

Do they raise summer lift pass prices to help revenues, or do they sell discount and promotional tickets to try to drive more participants to the hill to consumer other services?

Curious what you think @jeff.brines 

My interest is in how Alterra handles the next 12 months(Alterra owns Snowshoe). There was more trail maintenance and re-work last year than in the four years combined before. I’d like to see that trend continue. 

Consolidation of ownership has been an issue in the ski industry since the 90’s.   

Vail and Alterra will both eventually start cracking up, and new broligarchs will pick up the pieces and re-shuffle them into new roll-ups.

What we are seeing on the east coast is one hedge- funded family slowly buying up formerly independent resorts that have avoided mergers but have been desperately seeking operating capital.   

In the k-shaped economy the future of the ski industry, like the future of the bikepark industry is wealth management schemes.  Keeping your resorts private and managing them for losses is just about the only way to plan for a very uncertain climatic future.  Deleting the concept of shareholder value from the management of sports facilities… invaluable!

The interesting thing about Vail vs independent resorts is that I see some of their behavior rubbing off on the small guys.  Not the stock buybacks, but the rush to the bottom on season passes, leading to massive overcrowding.  Sierra-At-Tahoe got decimated by the big NorCal fires several years ago, wiping out their iconic West Bowl glades.  A lot of their infrastructure was damaged but they managed to come back.  We did season passes there for a couple years after they reopened, trying to support them as they were an indy.  But they aggressively priced their season passes to try and get cash flow to help dig out, and it led to massive overcrowding after 2 years.  It's on the Tahoe crest, so it's one of the easiest resorts to get to.  There's very limited "green" and easy "blue" terrain, so the overcrowding gets intensified.  It's sad because it was a great mountain, and I have some great memories of ridiculous powder days there, but there's no way we're going back until the crowding situation gets better.  The awful season we had this year won't help with the cash flow feedback loop either, and an independent outfit struggling to get bike can't even look at opening summer stuff (bike park, hiking, etc.) to help offset costs because they barely have the capital to keep going as-is.  Which is too bad, because the West Bowl area is basically a blank slate for summer trails now, and there is so much potential there.

Our local resort is privately-owned [I think], and has been consistently jacking up the winter season's pass price as a way to guarantee revenue. Almost the whole town has a seasons pass in the winter, and the hill gets mobbed on even a mediocre pow day. Ikon and Epic passes really crank up the visitation on the long weekends to the point that I got a mid-week pass instead of a full pass this season. For summer operations, they have kept the bike pass at the same price as last year [gasp!]. The tiny, underfunded trail crew did a great job on a couple of key trails last year, but I worry that we're in for a season of blown-out laps this summer. Bike trail maintenance seems to be totally dependent on the previous winter's revenues, and I don't think we had a great season, with the caveat that the parking lots were absolutely rammed all winter. Hopefully I'm wrong...

Losing a week of revenue at the beginning of March probably didn't help on a crappy winter either.

Revvy is a funny one, its an exercise in "how much can we jack up the ticket price without doing any of the expansion and investment that we said we'd do. Remember that planning PDF that was floating around that showed all the lifts we were going to build? We don't!". I suspect lots of other places are in a similar boat.  That said, it's one of the few places that might actually justify some investment. Looking into the future, it has a better shot of getting consistent snow due to its elevation and location than most other resorts. 

It's a small mountain masquerading as a premium AAA experience. Don't get me wrong, we are absolutely spoiled to have it and the terrain is amazing but it essentially is a two lift resort. There's only a few days a year where you actually want to ski below the top of the gondola these days. Skiing a midweek powder day is funny because it gets significantly better after 11 am. All the locals do their 2 laps and have to go to work. 

The hope is that the loss of the longest lift at the resort for a week [and sporadic loss of the main gondola and Stellar chair at the same time] will be a kick in the ass for management to get going on the new chair[s]. Last year's loss of the gondola at Kicking Horse should have been a wake-up call. The long-term development plan is creeping along with development of real estate on and off the mountain, but wow, do they ever need to start moving people into Montana Bowl. 

Sorry for the derail - back to bikes!