Flying Straight to the Slopes

Flying Straight to the Slopes

By CONOR DOUGHERTY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 2, 2005; Page W9

This winter, skiers will be able to log more time on the slopes and less in the air. Even as airlines cut back routes elsewhere they're boosting service to several major ski resorts, including more nonstop and jet flights.

Jackson Hole Airport in Wyoming will have 144,000 seats on arriving planes this ski season, up 12% from a year earlier, while Montrose Regional Airport, which serves the Telluride Ski Resort in Colorado, has nonstop flights from six big metropolitan areas including New York (via Newark, N.J.) and Los Angeles, up from two in the 2000-2001 ski season. Yampa Valley Regional Airport, which serves Colorado's Steamboat Ski Resort, also increased flights, and technology will soon cut the required wait between plane landings to around two minutes from as long as 15 minutes.

Why the generous airline schedules? Many ski areas have subsidized service for years, because airlines have a hard time turning a profit flying to mountain airports, where inclement weather and short runways make flights tough. Telluride recently added a 2% sales tax on lodging and restaurants and uses it to subsidize air service, while Jackson Hole's business community pays from $800,000 to $1 million a year to carriers, including American Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

The resorts offer the airlines a revenue guarantee, in which the ski communities essentially pay for unfilled seats. As resorts have become better at predicting their passenger loads -- and thus spending less for unfilled seats -- they have been able to add new flights.

Some ski resorts, though, are a bit behind. Mammoth Mountain Ski Area in California still doesn't have commercial air service, so skiers like Kenn Bicknell, a San Francisco librarian, have to fly one hour to Los Angeles and then drive five hours to the resort. "If I could just jump on a plane, I could go the same morning I want to go skiing," he says. Mammoth says it plans to add air service from Los Angeles next year.