NSCF Meets in Switzerland
By Bob Wilbanks, NCSN

The National Ski Council Federation’s (NSCF) annual meeting was held in Engelberg, Switzerland September 9 to 11. Headquartering at the four-star Hotel Terrace which had just celebrated its 100th anniversary, the officers of twenty-four of America’s largest regional ski councils listened to presentations about skiing in Switzerland, skier demographics, global warming and its affect on skiing, and how to run a successful, profitable, and very large, ski club.

Attendees also held an annual business meeting and enjoyed dinners on mountainside chalets-turned-into-restaurants and lunches at the Terrace Hotel -- all in the ambiance of the small village of Engelberg, high in the mountains above Lucerne.

Featured speakers, who were arranged by SkiEurope, were Ivan Breiter of the Switzerland Tourist Office; Jim Spring, president of Leisure Trends, the ski industry’s leading market research and demographics firm; Caroline Stuart Taylor, president of The Ski Club of Great Britain, perhaps the world’s most successful ski club - with 27,500 members; Phil Johnson, president of the North American Ski Journalist Association (NASJA); and Dr. Rolf Bürki, of the Geography Institute at the University of Zurich, a world-renowned expert on changing weather patterns and its impact on tourism.

Swiss skiing
Ivan Breiter of the Switzerland Tourist Office noted that Switzerland is a small country with some very large ski resorts containing 3,000 miles of ski runs. While European resorts normally measure their size in kilometers of trails and not acres or hectares, a Canadian writer recently concluded that Zermatt was three times the size of Whistler, North America’s largest ski resort. There are also scores of smaller, lessor-known resorts like Engelberg, where the NSCF was meeting.

Demographics
Jim Spring began by saying that ski clubs are not represented at SIA or NSAA meetings even though we constitute 20% of the ski market. (NSCN research concluded that the figure is closer to 10%.) Spring went on to say that the main influences on leisure time are demographics, where genXers (the young and tattooed) are 40% of the market and growing, while baby boomers (older folks with liver spots), although growing, are skiing less. He noted that for-profit adventure and activity clubs are encroaching on the traditional ski club’s market because the adventure clubs cater to the genXers and families with kids, while traditional ski clubs continue to target baby boomers as new members. See the complete text and accompanying charts at www.leisuretrends.com

World’s most successful ski club?
Carolyn Stuart Taylor, noted that the 27,500-member Ski Club of Great Britain was 100 years old in 2003, has a full-time staff of 27 plus 450 volunteers providing their members and the public with a glossy magazine, a website that serves 107,000 subscribers and on-snow representatives in 44 resorts, including Aspen, Heavenly, Vail, Breckenridge, and Jackson Hole. Their ski trips target member-skiers by their level of ability, with trips for off-piste skiing, beginners, and all levels in between. They also run trips for members in their twenties and for those in their fifties and above. Check out the Ski Club of Great Britain on their website.

Weather patterns and skiing
Dr. Rolf Bürki has done considerable research on weather patterns and the tourism industry. He described several models that his group developed that show global temperatures rising from 1.4 degrees to 5.8 degrees in the next 100 years. The possible long-term affects of global warming on the ski industry, are that some resorts at lower elevations, like Austria’s Kitzbuhel, may not exist as skiing venues in as short as twenty years from now. Other resorts, located at higher elevations, might be skiable only on the upper part of their mountains and their ski seasons might be considerably shorter in as little time as twenty years from now.

How to get the attention you want
Phil Johnson, president of NASJA (the National Ski Journalists Association), told assembled ski council members what writers and editors are looking for in ski news and when. He also discussed how clubs and councils can get attention on a national, regional and local level in both the general and ski media. He emphasized the need to know who the key people you need to stay in communication with at your local newspaper and other media, the need to know when and how to contact them. He noted that clubs and council need to contact the local and regional media and tell them what you are doing to be included in any story about skiing and active sports that they might be publishing or writing.

Councils and clubs need to know when their local media is going to do a story about skiing and send information that ties into what they are doing. (See our editorial in the September-October, 2004 issue.) He also suggested that clubs and councils create “home town heroes” with race results, officer election results, etc. that local media could tie into. Sending the media photos, press releases, etc. in order to get noticed and get into those articles and TV stories also works.

Member services committee chairman, Joe Harvis, reported on the Bollé ski helmet promotion, James Mershon reported on a proposed National Ski Council Federation race series, and a new position of treasurer was established. Dawn Petermann of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Ski Council was elected fill that position. Officers remaining for one year of service are Terry Rowley of the Metropolitan Detroit Ski Council, President; Michael German of the San Diego Ski Council, Vice President; and Bonnie West of the Los Angeles Ski Council, Secretary .

Hosts for the event were the Alpes Vaudoises, American Airlines, Davos Tourism, Engelberg Tourism, Grindelwald Tourism, Hotel Europe Engelberg, Hotel Terrace Engelberg, Titlis Berbahnen, Valais Tourism, Wengen-Mürren Tourism, Zurich Tourism, and Zermatt Tourism.

Following the convention, most attendees took advantage of optional post trip visits to the Jungfrau region (Interlaken and Grindelwald), the Alpes Vaudoises region, Davos, St. Moritz, Verbier, or Saas-Fee.

The next annual meeting of the National Ski Council Federation will be in Crested Butte, Colorado during September, 2005.

For more information about The National Ski Council Federation or to see additional photographs of this year’s convention in Engelberg, Switzerland, go to www.SkiFederation.org.

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