Ep. 30 - Richard Burkley, CEO of Lake Louise

Lake Louise's Secret Marketing Weapon? Consistency

Imagine running a ski area where you can ski for three days and still not cover half the terrain.With views so inspiring, you could alost forget how incredible the skiing is?

Now imagine that your marketing strategy is built around something surprisingly simple: keep the lifts spinning, keep the terrain open, and give people what they came for.

That sounds easy—but at a place like Lake Louise, with massive alpine terrain, unpredictable weather, a national park to operate in, and guests coming from around the world, making that happen is anything but simple.

Welcome back to Selling Snow, the podcast for ski industry pros,  marketers  or anyone who wants to learn how ski areas attract visitors.. I’m your host, Andrew Zwicker, with 25 years in and around marketing skiing,. This is a place to learn from your peers, share knowledge and experience, and discover what’s working, and what’s not at ski areas around the world, to take back to your home hill.

In this episode, we sit down with Lake Louise CEO Richard Burkley to talk about what it really takes to run one of the most iconic ski areas in North America—and why sometimes the best marketing strategy is simply delivering an incredible mountain experience, consistently.

We get into long-term planning, snowmaking, climate, short booking windows, marketing to mountain families, shared passes, employee cross-training, and one of my favorite ideas from the episode: “Follow the Guest.”

So let’s head up the Icefields Parkway, through Beautiful Banff National Park  for a chat with Lake Louise CEO Richard Burkley.

Top 10 Actionable Insights from Richard Burkley / Lake Louise

1. Make Consistency Your Marketing Message

Quick description: Instead of constantly inventing new marketing messages, build your brand around something guests can reliably expect every time they visit.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard repeatedly comes back to the consistency of the Lake Louise product: reliable early opening, lifts operating, major terrain being available, and a predictable experience. He says the "operation and the terrain speak far more than any marketing campaign." 

How other ski areas can use it: Identify the 2–3 things your mountain can consistently deliver better than competitors and make those the backbone of your marketing. Rather than saying "We're going to have an amazing winter," say something guests can actually count on: "Every weekend, this terrain will be open," "We're skiing until May," or "The lifts will be spinning."

2. Don't Market the Forecast—Market What You Can Control

Quick description: Weather forecasts are uncertain. Your operational readiness isn't.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard calls himself a "nowcaster" and says Lake Louise prepares for success regardless of what the seasonal forecast says. His philosophy is essentially: you don't ski forecasts—you ski the mountain. 

How other ski areas can use it: Don't build your winter campaign around "El Niño is coming" or predictions about how much snow you're going to get. Build campaigns around things you control: opening dates, snowmaking, terrain, events, grooming, food, parking and the experience. When the snow actually arrives, then amplify it aggressively.

3. "Follow the Guest" Instead of Following the Org Chart

Quick description: Staffing shouldn't necessarily be organized around fixed positions. It should be organized around where the guests are at different points in the day.

How Lake Louise uses it: Lake Louise cross-trains employees and moves people around based on demand. Richard describes starting his own day in parking, then moving to ticketing, lifts, food service and back to parking. They call the approach "Follow the Guest."

How other ski areas can use it: Map guest traffic hour-by-hour on a typical Saturday. Identify where demand spikes and create rover/cross-trained positions that can move between departments. Instead of staffing every department for its peak demand all day, move people to the bottleneck as the guest flow changes.

4. Cross-Train People to Understand the Whole Resort

Quick description: Cross-training isn't just about having backup staff. It creates employees who understand how their job affects everyone else's.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard says employees should understand what other departments actually do—even asking whether someone in snow safety understands what the dishwasher's job means to the resort. He believes that shared understanding makes departments support one another rather than operate as silos. 

How other ski areas can use it: Once or twice a season, put employees into another department for a few hours. Have lift operations experience guest services, guest services experience food & beverage, F&B experience parking, etc. The objective isn't simply labor flexibility—it is building organizational empathy and better decisions.

5. Build a Long-Term Plan Before You Need It

Quick description: Major mountain improvements can take years to get approved. If you wait until you need the infrastructure, you're already behind.

How Lake Louise uses it: The Locke family spent decades developing the long-range plan that ultimately enabled Lake Louise's recent expansions. Richard describes the current work as essentially implementing a plan that had already been approved years earlier. 

How other ski areas can use it: Don't make your master plan simply a list of projects you'd like to build. Identify where the resort needs to be in 5, 10 and 20 years, then work backward through permitting, environmental constraints, financing and infrastructure. Even if a project is 15 years away, starting the entitlement process now may be what makes it possible.

6. Invest in the Product Before Trying to Market Around Its Weaknesses

Quick description: Capital investment can be a marketing strategy when it materially improves what guests experience.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard identifies consistent capital investment as one of Lake Louise's most important things to get right. Terrain expansion, lifts, restaurants and infrastructure all improve the actual product rather than simply changing the advertising around it. 

How other ski areas can use it: When developing your capital plan, ask a marketing question alongside the financial and operational questions:

"What will guests actually notice?"

A lift replacement that cuts wait times, terrain expansion that creates a new experience, or infrastructure that makes getting around easier can generate years of marketing value—not just one campaign.

7. Use Your Natural Audience—Even If They Didn't Come to Ski

Quick description: You don't always have to create demand. Sometimes the opportunity is sitting right beside you.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard says a significant amount of Lake Louise's traffic comes from people visiting Banff National Park who didn't necessarily come intending to ski. They regularly hear from people at the ticket office who essentially say, "I didn't know there were ski areas here."

How other ski areas can use it: Look for large audiences already passing through your market—tourists, summer visitors, event attendees, hotel guests, highway traffic, mountain bikers, hikers, etc. Build a simple conversion path from "I'm visiting this destination" → "I should experience this ski area."

That's potentially much cheaper than trying to manufacture entirely new awareness through advertising.

8. Turn Your Biggest Operational Constraint Into a Strategic Priority

Quick description: Sometimes the thing holding back growth isn't terrain or marketing. It's something much more mundane.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard says parking has become one of Lake Louise's biggest constraints, and solving that problem means looking beyond parking itself—to public transportation, carpooling, rideshare and the overall way guests get to the mountain. 

How other ski areas can use it: Identify your true constraint to growth. It might be parking, employee housing, water, lift capacity, beginner terrain, food service or transportation. Then build a cross-department plan around removing that bottleneck rather than simply investing more money into the things that are already working.

9. Don't Underestimate the Marketing Value of Being Open

Quick description: Being open and delivering the promised product can be more powerful than another advertising campaign.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard's philosophy is essentially "must be present to win." If the mountain is open and the lifts are spinning, guests can come and have an experience. Lake Louise also uses its early opening consistency as a marketing advantage. 

How other ski areas can use it: Treat operational reliability as a marketing KPI. Don't just measure impressions and clicks. Track things like percentage of scheduled terrain open, lift uptime, opening-date consistency and guest disruptions. If your mountain reliably delivers, your marketing has something credible to sell.

10. Balance the Three Customers: Guest, Employee and Owner

Quick description: Richard's most interesting leadership framework may be his simplest: a ski area has to balance the needs of three groups simultaneously.

How Lake Louise uses it: Richard says problems emerge when the business becomes too skewed toward one side—too much focus on the customer can create overcrowding; too much toward ownership can make the product expensive; too much toward employees can create operational limitations. He identifies employees as the linchpin connecting all three. 

How other ski areas can use it: Put Guest / Employee / Owner across the top of major decisions and ask what each decision does for all three. It creates a useful check against decisions that look great financially but hurt the guest experience—or decisions that delight guests but aren't operationally sustainable.