Ep.31 - Chris Haggerty, GM of Monarch Mountain, Colorado
Monarch Added 400 Acres. Then They Kept Season Pass Prices Flat. Why?
What if you could grow your ski area by nearly 50%—without raising your season pass prices?
That’s exactly the kind of challenge Monarch Mountain in Colorado has taken on.
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, I’m joined by Chris Haggerty, GM of Monarch Mountain, to talk about the story behind their big No Name Basin expansion, how they’ve managed growth while staying true to what makes Monarch unique, the importance of season-pass holders and community, and some of the lessons Chris has learned stepping into leadership at an independent ski area.
We get into financial discipline, growing ancillary revenue, managing people and operations, and why sometimes the best thing a GM can do is simply listen to the people who already know what they’re doing.
And if you’re enjoying Selling Snow, help support the show by sharing it with a friend or colleague in the ski industry. It’s one of the easiest ways you can help us keep growing the show.
And now, let’s head out into No Name Basin with Chris Haggerty of Monarch Mountain, Colorado.
Top 10 Actionable Insights
1. Make Your Brand Promise a Constraint on Growth
Quick description:A brand isn't really a brand until it changes the decisions you make. Monarch doesn't simply market itself as an independent, natural, low-distraction ski experience—it uses that identity as a filter for what it will and won't build.
How Monarch Uses It:Monarch's growth strategy deliberately avoids chasing the traditional resort-development model of hotels, real estate and large base-area development. Even the No Name expansion was designed around preserving the natural experience, including small-scale facilities and a lift configuration intended to minimize mechanical noise in the new terrain.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Create a short list of 3–5 things your resort must remain known for, then use them as a capital-planning filter. For every major project, ask: Does this strengthen the experience we're trying to sell, or simply allow us to sell more of it? If it's the latter, think twice.
2. Don't Measure Growth Only by How Many People You Can Fit
Quick description:Monarch flips the traditional capacity equation around: the objective isn't maximizing the number of guests on the mountain; it's expanding capacity enough that growth doesn't destroy the experience that attracted people in the first place.
How Monarch Uses It:Monarch added nearly 400 acres of lift-served terrain—about a 50% increase—but Chris describes the objective as giving the resort more room to absorb growth while maintaining its uncrowded character. Their planning uses uphill/downhill capacity, terrain difficulty and density analysis rather than simply asking how many more people the lifts can move.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Put an experience-capacity metric alongside your traditional lift-capacity numbers. Track things like average trail density, lift-line duration, congestion at choke points and guest sentiment. Then establish a point at which additional visitation requires additional terrain or operational changes—not simply more aggressive utilization of existing infrastructure.
3. Use Financial Resilience as a Prerequisite for Capital Projects
Quick description:One of the smartest parts of Monarch's expansion story isn't the expansion itself. It's the financial discipline that happened before the expansion.
How Monarch Uses It:Ownership established a very specific threshold before approving the No Name project: enough cash in the bank that, in Chris's words, they could survive a "nuclear winter" and pay the entire team for a year without layoffs. They built that reserve over years, then delayed the project through COVID until the business was healthy again.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Instead of asking "Can we afford this project?", establish a minimum post-project resilience threshold first. For example: After this capital investment, could we survive a disastrous snow year, major equipment failure or prolonged closure without putting the organization at risk? Capital spending then becomes conditional on maintaining that safety margin.
4. Treat Your Best Employees as Part of the Product
Quick description:Monarch's competitive advantage isn't simply that employees are friendly. Management deliberately gives employees enough freedom to become memorable personalities—and those personalities become part of the guest experience.
How Monarch Uses It:Chris says Monarch has unusually high numbers of guest reviews specifically calling out individual lift operators and other employees. The management philosophy is to enforce safety and operational requirements while giving people room to be themselves.
That also connects directly to Monarch's marketing: the employees who are allowed to be characters become the characters the resort can tell stories about.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Identify the positions where human personality can materially improve the guest experience—lift operations, ticketing, patrol, instructors, parking, F&B—and deliberately give those employees more autonomy within clear boundaries. Then monitor guest mentions of individual employees in reviews and surveys. You're effectively measuring whether your culture is showing up in the product.
5. Don't Automate Away the Interactions Your Guests Actually Value
Quick description:Monarch offers a fascinating counterpoint to the assumption that every operational improvement should eliminate human interaction.
How Monarch Uses It:Chris argues that Monarch's fixed-grip lifts have unintentionally become part of the product. Because an operator has to be physically present at the loading station, guests interact with that person. Those operators subsequently get named in guest feedback. Chris sees that human contact as something worth protecting rather than automatically replacing with faster technology.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:For every proposed automation project, ask two questions:
What friction does this eliminate?
What human interaction does this eliminate?
Automate transactions that guests find annoying. Be much more cautious about automating interactions that guests remember.
6. Build Workforce Scheduling Around the Guest, Not the Job Description
Quick description:Instead of staffing each department independently, Monarch is experimenting with employees who move to wherever demand moves throughout the day.
How Monarch Uses It:Monarch created "rovers" who work in rentals during the morning rush, move to F&B during lunch, then return to rentals during the afternoon equipment-return rush. The result is a workforce that follows the guest flow rather than sitting underutilized in one department.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Map your hour-by-hour demand curve across departments. Look for positions that are busy at different times rather than simultaneously. Then create cross-trained "floating" positions that can move between those peaks.
The bigger insight isn't necessarily hire rovers. It's: stop scheduling labour around organizational charts and start scheduling it around the guest journey.
7. Use Customer Retention Data to Find the Real Problem
Quick description:A renewal rate tells you what is happening. The valuable management question is why.
How Monarch Uses It:Chris says Monarch's season-pass renewal rate runs around 80–85%, and rather than simply celebrating that number, the team examined the people who weren't renewing. They found that a significant portion were military families moving away from the area—meaning the apparent "churn" wasn't necessarily a dissatisfaction problem.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Don't just track renewal percentage. Break non-renewals into actionable cohorts:
moved away
price
snow/weather
injury
changed ski habits
poor experience
competing resort
insufficient usage
Then separate preventable churn from structural churn. Your retention strategy becomes dramatically more useful once you know which people you can actually save.
8. Turn Operational Philosophy Into Marketing Content
Quick description:Some of the best resort marketing doesn't start in the marketing department. It starts with a management decision that creates something worth telling a story about.
How Monarch Uses It:Monarch's philosophy of letting employees be themselves creates distinctive characters. Those characters then become marketing assets. Chris describes working with local creators to capture the emotions of first-time skiing and using stories around employees, patrol and the avalanche dog.
The Subaru collaboration is an especially good example: Monarch's local story became part of another company's advertising while simultaneously marketing Monarch.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Create a recurring process where marketing asks operations:
"What happened here this week that only our mountain could have produced?"
Then look for people, quirks, traditions, behind-the-scenes work, local characters and unexpected moments. Those are often much harder for competitors to copy than another polished ski video.
9. Translate Skiing Into a Language Non-Skiers Already Understand
Quick description:One of the biggest barriers to growing the ski market may be that the industry keeps explaining skiing to non-skiers in ski language.
How Monarch Uses It:Chris specifically talks about the challenge of attracting new participants and says traditional ski messaging doesn't necessarily resonate with people who have never skied. Monarch is experimenting with translating the emotional experience into concepts people already understand. He uses snow tubing as another accessible entry point: if you can sit, you can snow tube.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:Stop starting acquisition campaigns with:
"Skiing is..."
Start with something the target customer already understands:
"You know that feeling when..."
Then connect that familiar emotion to skiing. The marketing objective isn't to teach someone ski terminology. It's to make them recognize why they would want the experience.
10. When Something Fails, Diagnose the Execution Before Killing the Idea
Quick description:Monarch's lesson from a failed learn-to-ski initiative is particularly useful because Chris doesn't conclude that the product was bad simply because participation was low.
How Monarch Uses It:Monarch once participated in an industry program offering multiple lessons and a free season pass. Fewer than 10 people participated. Chris's takeaway wasn't "people don't want this." It was that Monarch hadn't given the program enough marketing resources and essentially expected people to discover it themselves.
How Other Ski Areas Can Use It:When a campaign or program underperforms, conduct a simple failure diagnosis before abandoning it:
Was the proposition wrong?
Was the target audience wrong?
Was the price wrong?
Was the distribution wrong?
Was there enough promotion?
Did the customer understand the offer?
Was the operational experience good enough?
A failed campaign can be evidence that the execution failed—not that the underlying idea failed.
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