If Vail Resorts Was A Country It Would be 8th In The World For Ski Areas
Vail’s latest acquisition of four more US resorts takes its tally of ski areas to 18 – most of them in the US, but also Canada’s leading resort of Whistler Blackcomb and Australia’s Perisher. The company has actually purchased 19 ski areas but merged The Canyons and Park City Mountain resort in Utah in to one to create the biggest ski area in the United States.
With the purchase of Crested Butte, Vail Resorts now own five resorts in their home state of Colorado whilst Stevens Pass is their first resort in Washington State in the US Northwest. They’ve also added to their US East Coast collection with Mount Sunapee in New Hampshire and Okemo in Vermont adding to Stowe.
Vail Resorts describe 15 of their ski areas as “world-class mountain resorts” and the remaining three centres in the US Midwest as “urban ski centres.”
While Vail Resorts and media commentators tend to focus on the number of resorts owned as Vail Resorts does battle with its recently formed competitor, the Aspen-backed Alterra Group, it may also be interesting to put Vail’s acquired empire in to a table of nations to seer just where it would rank if its resorts were all in one country called Vail.
Ski resort research company Snow24 maintains details of 6,400 ski areas in 77 countries. It reports that of these 29 of these countries have more than 18 ski areas, placing Vail-Resorts-as-a-country in 30th place in the world for number of ski areas*.
However many of these countries only have a handful of what might be classed “world-class mountain resorts” meaning that by that measure Vail Resorts moves up to 8th in the world behind only Austria, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and of course the USA.
“It’s open to debate what constitutes a ‘world-class mountain resort’ and certainly it could be argued that countries like China, Germany, Norway, Spain and Russia each have more than 15 of these, which would move Vail Resorts position down in this hypothetical table,” said a Snow24 spokesperson, “but we feel on balance Vail Resorts 15 destination ski areas are bigger than the top 15 in those countries.”
But is Vail Resorts now the world’s biggest private ski resort operator? Maybe… again it depends a lot on how you measure it.
The French-based Compagnie des Alpes had long been regarded as the biggest ski resort operator in the world by “skier days” and may still be number one (it claims 13.8 million skier days, it’s not clear if Vail have added their total together yet since they added the four new areas). However it has not expanded its resort portfolio over the past five years at anything like the rate that Vail Resorts have.
In terms of the number of lifts it operates across its 18 resorts, Vail Resorts has about 365 – one for every day of the year. The Compagnie des Alpes, which operates 11 of the biggest resorts in France directly (Including la Plagne -pictured above, Les Arcs, Tignes, Val d’Isere, Flaine, Meribel, Les 2 Alpes and others) and has a hand in several others including Chamonix, operates about 500 lifts and has muchj greater hourly uplift capacity than Vail Resorts, but a sizable proportion of this number are drag lifts, whilst most of Vail’s and high-speed chairs and gondolas.
- Countries with more than 18 ski areas: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iran, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, USA.
