Wanted: learner skiers

Press, 27 May 1981, Page 27

Wanted: learner skiers

Last January two huge earthscrapers rumbled up to the Mount Hutt Ski-field road and, once on the field, itself, began taking 24 cubic metre bites out of the slope behind the small learner’sarea. When they had finished, a few days later, Mount Hutt possessed one of the largest learners’ areas of any skifield in either New Zealand or Australia. Nearly 15,000 cubic metres of rock had been moved to form a professionally surveyed, gently sloping nursery. The cost was great — giant earthscrapers are not cheap to run — but for Mount Hutt it was a carefully calculated investment for the future of the company. “The Canterbury ski industry’s profitable future does not lie so much in,the skiers who presently ski, but in the people down in centres like Christchurch who haven’t as yet responded to the call,’’says the chairman of the Mount Hutt Ski Company (Mr Peter Yeoman). Many heard “the call” last season — Mount Hutt’s learner-skier numbers were up by 35 per cent — but the percentage of skiers in our population still hovers persistently around one per cent. In places in the United

States which have the same population as Canterbury and just as easy access to ski-fields, the figure is up around six to eight per cent. It was not always so. Fifteen years ago in North America, the figures were the same as those in New Zealand now, but then the ski-ing boom arrived.Ski-ing began to lose its snobbish, upper class, wealthy, exclusive image and while Andy Williams and Gerald Ford skied at Vail, it was Mum, Dad, and the kids piling into the station wagon at weekends to their little local ski area in ever increasing numbers that brought the boom. Some of the middle-size American ski areas unable to expand their facilities any further now have to impose restrictions on the number of lift tickets they can sell each day to keep the congestion down. Happily, ski-fields in New Zealand are a long way off that situation — when a triple chairlift is installed at Mount Hutt next year for instance, the field will be only half-way to its ultimate development — but skier numbers must nevertheless be increased at the rate of about 10 per cent a year to

make such further development profitable. Becoming an enthusiastic skier has been likened to being converted to a religion — non-believers are pestered to come up and “have a go", and so the word spreads. Left to itself, this process would probably have everyone ski-ing in 50 years or so. But it is in the next five years that ski-fields need these skiers and the word must spread more quickly. The campaign has been mounted on two main fronts; schoolchildren, and their parents. Ski-ing is the perfect family sport. No other recreation offers so much enjoyment for a family to have together and for the non-ski-ing family the contrast to a recreation like taking the kids camping for a “holiday” is quickly noticed. Ski lessons especially designed for children keep them out of parents’ hair for two or three hours during the day and because children learn to ski more quickly than adults, they can occupy themselves without lengthy supervision while Mum and Dad continue learning. With a few ski lessons and ski-ing days under their respective belts family members can then tackle more challenging slopes together.

Mount Hutt reaches into the family market by offering cut-price school trips in which children are properly’ introduced to ski-ing with ski school instruction. American studies have shown that the return rate for learner skiers who have been given instruction is very high. Those who "give it a go” without the back-up of lessons (even just one) tend to think that ski-ing is too difficult to learn — not surprising when you see such people floundering around in the snow getting cold and wet with no progress being made. The rationale behind the school trips is that if the kids I are enthusiastic, they'll be brought by their parents next time and there is another ski-ing family born, ready to pester non-believers. “We are showing more and more people that ski-ing is not just for the wealthy, as it once was. A wider and wider cross-section of the community is being reached and because the market is so important to us, our lift ticket and season pass pricing structures have been modified in the past couple of years to specifically cater for the family,” says Mr Yeoman. -