There's truth in numbers

For some areas, honesty is new reporting policy

For accuracy's sake, Mount Snow is providing percentage of terrain open instead of trail counts. (File/Associated Press)

For as long as the skiing industry has self-reported snow conditions and trail counts, there have been customers willing to challenge and gripe about the accuracy of those reports.

Now, technology and a newfound emphasis on transparency may be tilting the industry toward being more truthful.

"The new buzzword is transparency," said Kelly Pawlak, general manager at Mount Snow in southern Vermont, which this season became the first New England resort to abandon trail counts in favor of reporting acreage and the percentage of terrain that is open. "We try to be as honest as possible."

Although it would be nice to think altruism is what guides the snow sports industry in such policy shifts, the beneficial economics of a truth-or-consequences approach are more likely the motivating factor.

Customers are no longer content to take a marketing department's word on snow cover and trail counts. They expect to see webcam footage of what the mountain really looks like, and they check updated blogs and message boards for independent reviews. Often, they do this while cruising up the interstate to help decide which resort will get their money.

"People are quite literally driving to the mountain and checking on the fly," said Jen Butson, director of public affairs for the trade group Ski Vermont. "It's truth in timeliness. I don't want to be selling sunshine and daisies if I've got crust and thaw."

Such candor was not always the hallmark of ski marketers. Newspaper columns critical of exaggerated snow reports began as far back as the early 1960s. In 1977, the New York Times bemoaned, "Every American ski area issues a daily report on its snow conditions. The problem is that they are always subjective, often too optimistic, and sometimes downright false." Later in the same article, a ski industry publicist described the practice more bluntly: "They've been getting away with lying through their teeth for years."

In the late 1970s, a group of resorts in the Rockies banded together to agree on reporting a mathematical rating system known as the Ski Quality Index, but the idea failed to catch on. A decade later, one-upmanship rivalries between New England's fiercely competitive heavy-hitter mountains spawned the era of bulked-up trail counts. Seemingly overnight, top-to-bottom runs were re-named into three or four separate trails, multiplying the number of runs without adding any actual terrain.

"When Mount Snow announced they were changing over to reporting acreage, they were hoping to get out of the trail count race," said Tom Cottrill, president of SnoCountry Mountain Reports in Lebanon, N.H., which bills itself as the largest ski conditions reporting service in the world.

Pawlak explained that two years ago, when Mount Snow was bought by Peak Resorts of Wildwood, Mo., the new parent company emphasized that it wasn't in favor of listing an inflated total number of runs if those trails are really just connectors or "upper" and "lower" portions of the same run.

For example, a resort might list 40 of 50 trails as open. But if only three of those runs go top to bottom, that trail count can mislead the public into thinking 80 percent of the mountain is skiable. The theory also cuts the opposite way: If only 10 of 50 trails are reported open, but those runs offer fantastic conditions spread out over ample acreage, the public might wrongly deduce the mountain is only 20 percent skiable.

In the West, using acreage as a benchmark is a bit more prevalent, because those resorts are dominated by spacious, open terrain. Mount Snow is known for its wide, boulevard-like trails and expansive snowmaking, so Peak Resorts decided that ditching trail counts in favor of acreage would be more accurate for customers and more advantageous for marketing the mountain's best features.

"In the beginning, when we rolled it out, people thanked us for our honesty," said Pawlak. After four months, she added, the acreage count has become more or less adopted as routine by her customers.

But that acceptance has been slow to spread beyond Mount Snow.

At first, Cottrill thought the idea was "ambitious," and he can envision a time when new formats of reporting will be beneficial to the snow sports industry. But as for right now, his company has encountered a "mechanical situation" that precludes SnoCountry from reporting acreage instead of trail counts to the hundreds of media outlets it serves (including The Boston Globe).

Cottrill said SnoCountry is set up to process daily conditions from more than 900 resorts worldwide by using a standard system of input. If a resort opts not to disclose a trail count, the report will show that they have no runs open.

"We're trying to keep things consistent and standard for everyone," said Cottrill. "I had to call them up and say, 'Look, give me some time, and I'll work on this. But if you don't give us a number, it defaults to zero.' "

Mount Snow's acreage and terrain percentage are also omitted from the conditions updated daily by Ski Vermont, which compiles its own data. Butson said she "appreciates the innovation, but for measurement standards, we have to have some unity."

Cottrill said he is willing to help Mount Snow and other resorts incorporate new ideas into ski condition reports. The topic is on the agenda for a SnoCountry brainstorming session with industry executives later this month.

"We knew that it would be difficult for some of the reporting services," said Pawlak, who remains confident Mount Snow's model will win over converts. "The devil is in the details."

To a large extent, the dissemination of ski conditions has always relied on self-reporting. Even in the 1960s, when most large Northeast radio stations had so-called independent ski reporters, the on-air personalities relied on a network of industry contacts who only seemed to favor objectivity after a blizzard.

In 1968, SnoCountry was formed not just to get the word out, but to try and bring some clarity to reports. Cottrill said back then, there was even bickering over basic terminology, like what constituted "packed powder" or "frozen granular."

Cottrill has seen the business evolve from daily phone calls to a secure computerized program that allows resort operators to report their own conditions. He acknowledged this method is an "inexact science," but he said his company's checks and balances, combined with peer pressure, keep the reports as accurate as possible.

"Given the Internet, if consumers today want to challenge something, it would be pretty easy to do," Cottrill said. "Plus, it's a small industry. [The resorts] would challenge one another."

In an age where a consumer can shoot video via mobile phone and post it to the Internet by the time a chairlift ride is over, the fudge factor seems to have been mitigated by technology.

"I wouldn't call it fudging," said Butson. "But there has been a shift at ski areas to offer a clearer description."

Pawlak said word of mouth is the best advertising, because a consumer's opinion carries more weight than a press release.

"Our customers do a lot of reporting for us," Pawlak said. "Whether you're buying a toaster or going skiing, you read the online reviews first before you plunk down your money."