After 3 years of planning, approvals, funding, building, we have reservations on the books! Actually, one of them is a wedding, which I wasn’t even advertising for. It was always our plan to do events also, and we oversized the water system, septic and electrical system for that reason, I just didn’t realize the demand, without even advertising for events. The pace of bookings has been good also, we don’t really want to open and have like 3 bookings, but we also don’t want to have the whole summer/fall sold either. The trick is really to get enough bookings early enough to get those good reviews soon, but not so many bookings that you’ve sold too much of an unknown product, before it becomes a known product. The product becomes known as soon as we get reviews, when it becomes much, much more valuable. Also, I’m not even on Airbnb yet, just Vrbo. And I don’t have a google business profile yet so I don’t show up on Google maps. Both of those things require a more complete building, and are the most important advertising tools.
Weddings and events at the Lodge are tough to price. The wedding booking recently went something like this. We want to use your lodge for our wedding, but we’ll bring in everything, you don’t have to do anything more than you would for a normal booking, so don’t charge us more. On the surface, I completely understand, but there are a bunch of wear and tear that guests don’t think about. The main thing people don’t realize is how much of a luxury it is to flush a toilet on the side of a mountain with very little top soil. To put a septic system in, we had to dynamite out a hole for the leach field and bury the leach field in special, very expensive sand. This system is designed for 12 people to flush toilets, take showers, etc… continuously. If I have 30 people at the lodge every day, it’ll definitely overwhelm the system. So, I need to make sure that there are gaps between events for the septic to process waste. If you overwhelm the septic system, either the sewer will back up into the house, or the leech field will become a disgusting swamp. Beyond just the septic system, there is wear and tear on the road, property, the water system which is fed by a 5gpm spring and has to be stored for high demand periods, the solar/battery/generator system which will probably be burning propane to keep up with electrical demand, all the gas for cooking for all of those people, firewood, etc… There’s so much more that goes with big groups that have problems when provide all of your own utilities!!
We’ve actually already received and an inquiry about next winter!! They asked me how much guiding would be. If you’ve been following this blog from the beginning, you’ll know that we had to sign an agreement with the county to have guests guided to the house in the winter due to avalanche risk. We hadn’t really planned on figuring out the details of winter operation for a few months, but apparently, I should figure all of this out now since prospective guests are already thinking about it. I asked San Juan Expeditions, the company we had originally talked to about guiding our guests, for pricing based on number of guests and length of stay. What I was looking for was a “$xxx and up” kind of price, which I think most prospective guests understand and are looking for. What they gave me was the max price, I think. For a 2 night stay, they included 3 days of guiding. Our people might want 3 days of guiding if they’re staying 2 nights, or they might want to be taken to the house at 4pm, guided the next day, and taken back to town the next morning. So, the prices are very high, which is going to stop a lot of the bookings from happening. I’ve put the prices on the website, but I’m considering pulling them off until I can get some other guide company to commit to a real, lower base price for my guests that isn’t going to cause sticker shock.
There is also an argument to be made for keeping the published guiding prices the way they are or at least high, when you consider our winter competition. People pay an absurd amount of money to go to Vail or any other big resort town and stand in lift lines with thousands of other people. For a lot of these people, I really don’t think that’s what they want, It’s definitely not what I want! I think most people want a ski trip without crowds where they can relax in the mountains and ski powder, the way skiing was 20 years ago! For a 4 person family to travel to Vail, stay in a nice place, eat good food and and ski for a week would probably cost 15k now. What do they get for that? Most of the time they’re standing in 30 minute lift lines or skiing down pretty crowded runs. Normally it snows once while they’re there, and they get a morning of powder, which is tracked out by 10am.
Let’s imagine that same family books the San Juan Backcountry Lodge. The Lodge with a guide for a normal week in the winter will be probably 6k. The guide can take them on snowmobiles to wide open meadows at 11000ft or they can cross country ski on groomed paths by themselves, or they can go snow cat skiing to the top of Kendall Mountain, or they can get picked up by helicopter and flown to the top of Kendall Mountain or to Silverton Mountain Ski Resort, which uses helicopters daily. If they’re really fit, they can split board or use cross country skis with skins to hike up Kendall Mountain. Whether you get up the mountain with a helicopter, snow cat, snowmobiles, or by just hiking up, you can ski powder a week after a snowstorm! And by the way, from the top of Kendall Mountain, you can ski all the way down to the San Juan Backcountry Lodge, 3000 vertical feet.
If they just cross-country ski’d or split board, their trip would definitely be less than the Vail trip. With snowmobiles, a little less. Taken to the top with a snow cat daily might be as much as the Vail trip and the Helicopter would be more expensive, but probably not by much. There’s got to be a huge demand and a tiny supply for what I’m describing! We just have to package it up and advertise it in a way that doesn’t confuse people. How do I advertise this? My plan is to run Youtube and Instagram adds to drive traffic to the website. I’ll put together those reels soon and probably start putting advertising money behind them mid-summer, when people start thinking about their ski trip.
My dream, I think the best outcome, would be for this place to have 2 to 3 events per month with vacation rental stays in between, in the summer and fall. In the winter, we’ll have 5 or 6 ski trips a month, with a full time cook/guide that lives on site in the winter and a cleaner that comes on a snowmobile to clean. The person that lives on site will be handy, fixing the little things, and he/she will handle bookings, talking with guests, and do some social media. And most importantly, Adam and I will show up whenever there’s a snow storm and no one has booked it, and shred Silverton Mountain whenever we can. That’s the goal!!
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