Closed for more than 200 days a year, how do ski resort hotels make money?
Recently, a skiing enthusiast named Xiao Zhang planned to go skiing in Yabuli, Heilongjiang. When he booked a room one and a half months in advance, he found that the weekend room rate of an established hotel near the ski resort was nearly 2,000 yuan per night. However, when he consulted about the check-in time, the customer service reminded him that the hotel would only operate until late March of the following year, and the entire building would be closed and sealed from April until the next ski season reopens. Xiao Zhang originally thought the hotel would launch promotional discounts in the off-season, but he never expected it to shut down directly. On one hand, the room rate is nearly 2,000 yuan in peak season, on the other hand, the hotel does not receive guests for more than half of the whole year. How on earth do ski resort hotels calculate this account?
2,000 yuan per night in ski season: Why do they only open for 100 days?
For people who are not familiar with skiing, this situation is somewhat hard to understand.
Yabuli is located in Heilongjiang, with low winter temperatures and relatively suitable snow conditions for skiing. Why can't the hotel continue to operate when the weather is still cold? Even if natural snowfall decreases, can't artificial snowmaking extend the ski season?
With these questions, Xiao Zhang learned more from the hotel staff, only to find that the operation of ski resort hotels is not as simple as he imagined.
The staff explained to Xiao Zhang that most of the snow on the ski trails for tourists to slide on is sprayed out by snow machines. Artificial snowmaking is never omnipotent. It can only work normally when the temperature drops below minus 2 degrees Celsius. If the temperature rises to 5 degrees Celsius above zero during the day, even if the snow machine is running at full capacity, the snow sprayed out will melt as soon as it falls on the trail and cannot accumulate at all.
Even if the temperature is sufficient, the cost of snowmaking is extremely high. A snow groomer costs tens of thousands of yuan just for fuel to run for one day. When spring comes and the temperature rises, if the ski resort insists on opening for an extra half month, the cost of snowmaking alone will eat up all the profits earned in the peak season.
Therefore, the operation window of Yabuli is not as long as the operator wants, but strictly restricted by the local temperature and snowfall conditions. The ski season opens in mid-November every year and closes in late March, which is about four months in total, and it cannot last one more day.
Moreover, in Yabuli after the beginning of spring, the daytime temperature is still around minus 10 degrees Celsius. As long as the whole building receives guests, the heating has to be turned on 24 hours a day, and the gas and electricity cost alone is thousands of yuan per day.
In addition, it is necessary to arrange on-duty staff for the front desk, housekeeping and restaurant, and labor cost is also a fixed expenditure. If there are not many guests on weekends, the revenue from room fees in one day can't even cover the heating cost, so it is better to close and seal the building directly to save all these variable costs.
The so-called "closing and sealing" is not as simple as just locking the door. Before the end of the ski season, the engineering team will drain all the water in the heating pipes of the whole building. Otherwise, in the winter with temperature below minus 30 degrees Celsius, the residual water will freeze and crack the pipes, and the maintenance cost alone will cost hundreds of thousands of yuan in the next year.
The boiler needs to undergo a full set of anti-rust maintenance, all linens in the guest rooms are removed for cleaning, disinfection and packed into storage; all green plants in the lobby are moved to the indoor greenhouse for maintenance to avoid being frozen and damaged.
The whole hotel only keeps two elderly local employees, who patrol and check the fire facilities, doors and windows every day, and their salaries are paid according to local standards.
In fact, the mode of only opening for 100 days a year mainly applies to small hotels and local homestays next to the outer ski trails of Yabuli, which were built by private owners following the skiing boom in the early years.
After all, these small shops are located in remote areas, and few local tourists will specially go there even in summer. The cost of opening to receive guests cannot be covered by the room revenue, so they simply focus on doing business in the four-month ski season.
Most of the high-end chain hotels in large resorts operate all year round, and their logic is different from these small shops.
However, the 100-day operation period a year does not mean that high prices can be sold every day. New Year's Day, Spring Festival and weekends are usually the periods when hotels are most likely to get high room rates; many skiing enthusiasts only see the tension of snatching rooms in the peak season, and have never seen the empty parking lot of the ski resort on weekdays.
After all, most skiing enthusiasts come here during holidays, and few guests are willing to take time off from work to go skiing on workdays. The average room rate and occupancy rate spread over the whole year are actually far less attractive than they look in the peak season.
Closing saves costs, but operation risks cannot be avoided
This mode of "operating in ski season and sealing up for the rest of the time" seems to save all variable costs in the off-season, which is very shrewd, but in actual operation, there are many long-term hidden costs behind it.
The most prominent problem is that it is impossible to retain talents.
China Tourism Daily once calculated this account in an analysis of the operation mode of ski resort hotels: during the resort closing period, the number of retained personnel is only 10% - 30% of the full capacity, and the labor cost can be reduced by more than 50%.
Mature resort closing systems such as chain hotel groups can reduce the number of personnel to less than 10% during the closing period, and the remaining personnel are mostly the core team of engineering, finance and preparation for the next season.
This is not a small number. For a hotel with hundreds of guest rooms, what is the magnitude of labor cost when it is operating at full capacity? After 70% to 90% of the staff are cut during the closing period, the saved money directly becomes a positive number on the profit statement.
For ski resort hotels with heavy assets and high fixed costs, "closing the door" itself is a cost reduction action, and it is the most effective one.
Laying off all employees during the closing period seems to save a lot of salaries, but when the next ski season reopens, the whole service team of front desk, housekeeping and restaurant has to be recruited and trained from scratch.
A recruitment notice of a ski resort hotel in Beidahu is very straightforward: the employment nature is seasonal employment (ski season), the working period is from early October to the end of March of the next year, and the employment ends when the ski season is over.
But from the perspective of employees: why would a room attendant or restaurant waiter with a monthly salary of several thousand yuan wait for nothing in the remaining seven months just for these five months of work?
Most people choose to work on the mountain during the ski season, go down the mountain when the snow melts, or simply switch to another industry.
Ski resort hotels do have countermeasures for this.
A common practice in some hotel groups is "migratory bird-style deployment": during the resort closing period, core backbones are sent to support other seasonally operating stores of the same group, and then come back when the ski season arrives.
The local homestay ecosystem in Yabuli demonstrates this logic more clearly. Some local residents will vacate their own houses to receive tourists during the ski season, temporarily move to other places to live, and move back after the ski season ends.
An old local resident revealed to Space Insider on the social platform: he moves to the fungus planting base on the mountain at the end of October every year, and does not return to the town until the end of March of the next year. His three-bedroom apartment can earn more than 20,000 yuan in one ski season, and some people in the town can even earn more than 100,000 yuan in one ski season with a villa. There is no problem for small town homestays to operate in this way, since they use their own houses and provide services by themselves, the cost is inherently low. But this mode is difficult to copy directly to hotels with hundreds of guest rooms.
Secondly, long-term resort closing also involves an unavoidable hardware cost. The Zhangjiakou Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism once mentioned that for a long time, ski resorts in Chongli have been facing the operation pressure of "supporting three seasons with the revenue of one season".
The passenger flow is concentrated from November to February of the next year, and for the rest of the time, ski resorts, hotels and merchants are at a standstill, and heavy assets such as ski trails, ropeways, ski equipment halls and supporting hotels are in a large state of idleness. Idleness does not mean zero cost.
The door is closed, but depreciation is still accrued. After the boiler is drained, it has to be refilled with water, pressure tested and inspected in the next winter. Once the pipes are frozen and cracked, the maintenance cost can eat up the profits of several days in the peak season.
For guest rooms that are vacant for more than half a year, the loss of decoration and linens does not stop timing just because no one lives there. These expenditures are not included in "operating costs", but they are not less paid at all.
What is more uncontrollable than equipment aging is that this business is essentially betting on the weather.
The opening date is not set by the hotel itself, but follows the snow condition. The revenue of the whole year depends on the ski season to amortize the annual fixed costs and recover the previous renovation investment, and all the returns are bet on the short few months of the ski season.
If there is a warm winter with insufficient natural snowfall and the ski resort cannot keep up with snowmaking, the opening time will be postponed for ten days, and the hotel will lose ten days of room sales, which are variables that operators cannot control no matter how hard they try.
Just like last year, Harbin Ice and Snow World closed the park one week earlier than the scheduled time because the temperature broke the historical extreme value, and some ski resorts postponed their opening time for as long as half a month.
Space Insider believes that the biggest vulnerability of this business model lies here: it does not have much buffer space. If the snow is heavy enough and there are enough holiday tourists, the hotel can make profits in the current year. If the snowfall is insufficient and there are few tourists, the investment of the whole year may be wasted.
This income instability also makes this type of hotel less popular in the asset trading market. After all, no one is willing to take over a property that is vacant for half a year and whose return depends on the weather.
Only operating in ski season, or turning the hotel into a four-season business
Of course, not all ski resort hotels are willing to only do business for 100 days.
Many established hotels in Yabuli, Chongli, Changbai Mountain and other places insist on not closing all year round even if there are few guests in summer. They carry out mountain bike camps, parent-child research tours and corporate team building activities. Even if the summer revenue can only cover part of the fixed costs, it is better than sealing the whole building directly.
The first type is to turn the single-season operation into a systematic methodology. Club Med Yabuli Resort is a local representative that applies its system advantages to operation.
Its operation is not only centered on guest rooms, but also involves multiple service links such as catering, entertainment and kids' club. During the peak season, different positions need to work in coordination. Employees not only need to complete daily reception work, but also ensure the continuity of vacation experiences such as skiing, catering and parent-child activities.
In the off-season, the hotel needs to maintain equipment and facilities to prepare for the next round of operation. For groups with multiple vacation destinations, cross-store communication and personnel deployment also provide more space for seasonal operation.
The key to this kind of experience is not simply to reduce off-season staff, but to keep personnel, equipment and service system operating effectively in different operation stages as much as possible.
This is the most mature operation method, and also the most difficult one to copy. It is built on the basis of the coordination of brand, channels and multi-destination resources, and cannot be directly copied by individual ski resort hotels.
The second type is to add new consumption reasons for summer. What Yabuli Sunshine Resort has been doing in the past two years can be summed up in one sentence: find new business scenarios beyond ski trails.
This summer, Sunshine's mountain bike park officially opened. In September, it launched recruitment for experience races on primary and intermediate tracks, and then added a new 2559-meter alpine slide, which is clearly marked by the official as "supporting four-season operation".
The local publicity caliber is that Sunshine Ski Resort has added professional mountain bike tracks, positioning itself as "skiing in winter, cycling in the other three seasons". The summer of the ski resort is being gradually filled by bicycles, slides and mountain sports, which is the most mainstream direction.
In this regard, Changbai Mountain Wanda International Resort has been exploring for many years, and it is the leading sample among domestic ski resorts that first carried out four-season operation.
The resort gathers a number of high-end hotels such as Westin, Hyatt and Park Hyatt, and has systematically laid out summer formats since 2018: it receives winter tourists from all over the country with skiing in winter.
In summer, targeting the local summer escape demand in Northeast China, it carries out various activities such as forest rafting, sightseeing on the west slope of Tianchi Lake, and parent-child research camps. It even specially cooperates with travel agencies in Shenyang and Changchun to launch weekend summer escape special lines to fill the hotels that were empty in summer before. Now the overall average summer occupancy rate of the resort has stabilized at more than 50%, more than doubling compared with the early stage of transformation.
Among them, Park Hyatt Changbai Mountain with the highest positioning has turned this logic into products. Opened in 2013, this hotel has one main building and nine detached villas, with a total of 164 guest rooms including 36 suites, and the smallest room type is 55 square meters.
Its price is almost reset according to seasons: in March of the non-ski season, the price is about 900 yuan per night; in the ski season, the price is generally over 3000 yuan, and even reaches about 5000 yuan around the Spring Festival. The price of the same room differs by 6 to 8 times between the off-season and peak season.
This price difference is not arbitrary price hike, but two sets of different products. In winter, Park Hyatt sells the experience that you can step on the ski trail right after leaving the hotel room, and soak in hot spring right after getting off the ski trail.
In summer and autumn, it sells original forests, outdoor mineral hot springs and boardwalks. It does not need to insist on selling skiing products in the off-season, but only needs to sell another set of experience.
With ten hotels gathered together, some focus on skiing families, some receive conferences and team building activities, and some take turns to do maintenance in the off-season, so the scheduling space is much larger than that of a single hotel operating alone.
The last type is the most primitive and flexible one: the family hotels in Yabuli Qingyun Town. They only do business for five months a year, leave the houses empty for the rest of the time, and the owners go back to the mountain to plant fungus. They have no cost pressure and no service standards to maintain, and they earn pure asset spread.
Therefore, seasonal operation is not a low-level mode, and year-round operation is not the only answer. The key lies in whether the hotel's asset structure and operation cost are suitable.
Back to the original question: Is it really feasible to operate for only 100 days a year? The answer is yes, but not all ski resort hotels are suitable for this mode.
For projects with scarce ski trail resources, stable peak season customer sources and sufficient product premium, focusing on operation in the ski season may be more cost-effective than maintaining a complete operation team all year round.
For projects with resources such as forests and hot springs and overall resort development capabilities, four-season operation can open up new revenue space for hotels.
After the ski season ends, tourists leave and the hotel closes, but this business does not really stop.
How to arrange personnel, how to maintain equipment, and how to restart in the next season, these invisible work also determine whether the hotel can continue to make profits when the next snow comes.