Maximizing Seasonal Performance
Large Ski Resort
A ski resort near Lake Tahoe required support in building straightforward strategies for cost management that could be easily implemented by their seasonal leadership team. The property’s owners engaged Carpedia Hospitality to establish operational baselines and guide the resort toward maximized profitability.
THE CHALLENGE:
Upon arriving to the mountain, Carpedia Hospitality quickly discovered that there was limited structure in place to collect and analyze data for the resort’s rental, retail, F&B, and hotel divisions. Leaders and ownership lacked visibility to whether individual departments were tracking toward profitability goals, or whether line level employees were deployed effectively relative to the volume of skiers on property. There was also no formal system in place that tied forecast skier volume to drive scheduling decisions.
The resort also experienced challenges in motivating seasonal managers to drive profitability due to the temporary nature of their positions. To be successful, any new strategies or tools had to be easy to implement and made accessible via web-based platform or a mobile device.
THE SOLUTIONS:
Carpedia Hospitality conducted observations in each department to understand processes and worked closely with the leaders to analyze skier volumes and seasonality patterns. An hours-based productivity approach was developed for each position across the resort to inform forecasting, scheduling decisions and provide insights into labor budgets.
To assist in tying schedules to volume, Carpedia Hospitality analyzed historical data around temperature, snowfall, hotel occupancy, and other available statistics and constructed a forecasting tool to predict many key volumes indicators for specific venues across the resort.
Once performance metrics were identified, Carpedia Hospitality built a customized cloud-based interactive reporting dashboard that was accessible by web and mobile devices. The reporting dashboard removed the administrative burden from the venue manager’s daily reporting activities and collected information from many enterprise solutions that previously did not communicate with each other. This allowed for improved visibility into daily performance and profitability and facilitated accessible reporting at all levels of the organization. This accessibility gave senior leadership improved visibility to budget tracking enabling them to react proactively to shifts in business patterns.
Daily meetings were implemented to review the new reporting which allowed management to better manage costs actively and monitor trends in skier behavior. Leaders remained in contact with Carpedia Hospitality to expand automated reporting to include tracking for pace of retail sales compared to prior years. Overall, the culture of the resort shifted to one of consistent analysis and continuous improvement.
THE RESULTS:
After a year of tracking results, the ski resort achieved 100% of planned labor savings. Through establishing operational baselines and improving the visibility to performance metrics, Carpedia Hospitality was able to guide the team to continued profitability.
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