Year on year Freshers (new arrivals) arrive in the Alps to run a ski chalet and live the dream. You can’t miss them – they glow in the dark unmistakably labelled by their puppy dog grins, Tigger like bounce and the brand new shiny mountain jacket! Many have been allured by the expectation of 26 weeks holidays (the weeks in between the winter and summer season) walking, climbing, mountain biking, you name it! Notwithstanding the other 26 when they will be mostly on the piste and hills, living the dream, in-between serving the guests.

Living The Dream 

Or so they think……

Skiing All The Time

That would be nice. We know it should have been different, surely we should have been on the slopes everyday, so what happened? Well where shall I start, if you are going to run your chalet yourself there is the menu planning, shopping, cooking, the cleaning, the guests requests, ski transfers, cakes to make, enquiries to answer (assuming you get some), marketing, sales, invoices to pay, accounts to do, accountants to deal with, taxes to pay, websites to update, the list is endless.

Some of course have a cunning plan – employ staff, but such need interviewing, employing, managing, mothering, wages paid, problems escalated (to you)and resolved, and then there is the marketing, the sales, the accounts, etc still to do. More time on the slopes you thought -I guess now might be a good time to take a rain check!

With Our Website The Bookings Should Come Flooding In

This notion last typically six months before reality steps in and you slowly realise only friends and family have booked the chalet. It may well be a beautiful website that you have had designed – but if it just happens to be on page 20 of Google, it is the equivalent of having a beautiful shop front set on a remote desert island. Call it the Robinson Crusoe moment when it dawns that no one is likely to be passing by soon.

Some will highlight the social media opportunity, but be under few illusions that for this to work it is a timely and resource intensive process (many have been surprised at the level of consistent effort required here). Also consider the fact that time is probably fine during the enthusiastic pre-season – but less effective when in full flight of service and during heat of operational delivery when it will be the first thing that inevitably gets pushed to the back of the queue!

Few therefore make it without support. The latter come in the form of Agencies who are there for a reason, they help your customers find you, they take some of the marketing, sales and website duties away, and they use their economies of scale to bring customers to your doorstep (fly them so to speak using the earlier analogy). Of course it isn’t free, but why should it be as they have expended significant time, resources and costs to be in the position they are in order to be able to bring customers to you.  Think hard therefore before embarking on a lonely path as such an alternative is often no customers or very expensive marketing costs that far exceed the fees agents expect to recover helping you sustain your business. 

Now That’s Not Supposed To Happen

But it does! Disasters, crisis, you name it constantly happen to many a novicess surprise. The mini-bus failing to start, the oven cutting out 20 minutes before dinner, the soufflé that doesn’t rise, and they’re just the easy problems. Of course you may have been on several ski holidays and these have run smoothly and think therefore that this is just over dramatised – but you may want to think again. New operators are always amazed by what goes on behind the scenes, but with the good operators the clients never actually see it! We fix, we improvise, we make sure the client is delighted, we deal with the stress, the panic, the behind the scenes heartache, and never a customer will know! It what makes great service.

Well A Least I’ll Be A Rich In A Year Or Two?

Probably not in most cases we would guess! Competition, taxes, staff costs, mortgages, equipment, food, wine, you name, leaves little at the end of each season. Life style change it is, licence to print money it certainly is not. Ski resorts are expensive places, and running a ski business comes with high standards (and subsequent costs) , as well as a great deal of wear and tear too (depreciation). Business plans as a consequence are nearly always frighteningly optimistic! Whatever you budget, start again and triple it, in fact don’t bother – it will have no bearing on whether it works or not!

But Don’t Back-out Just Yet

If you have read to here, you really do have staying power, but by now you are probably wondering why anyone would ever take such a step? And here is the interesting bit. Living Your Dream it is probably not, but despite all of what has been said so far, it is a strangely intoxicating experience, and few of us would change it. We may only see the beautiful scenery from our chalets and officers but we are at least masters of our own destiny, running our own business, the choices we make are ours, our success or otherwise (mainly) we influence personally. We see the fruits and spoils of our labour, but most importantly we deal with beautiful people who we are here to serve and in turn have the pleasure of experiencing their enjoyment. 

It is on the last point we will conclude. You see, whilst we start off with great expectations of what it will be like for us, success comes when we realise it never was about us in the first place.  Dealing with operational issues and service delivery (always discreetly in the background) we start to realise it is about something far more enriching. The extra mile we go for example that creates the smile on clients faces when they sit down to eat their favourite dinner they only mentioned in passing a day or two before, the joy clients express in getting down their first red run, or the hardest black run in the resort, is quite simply infectious and a privilege to see. Would we therefore do it all over again, damn right we would, because we now know that it was never ever about us – but about something truly more fulfilling – Helping Them Live Their Dream!