Mammoth Mountain recap with VP Pam Murphy

After the abundant snow season last year,  we decided to catch up with Mammoth Mountain Vice President Pam Murphy to talk about the past season and plans for next season, including retail and travel partnerships.

How did the season go? It seems like it was a huge year. How much snow did you end up getting? What did it all mean for business?

We had a great season. We had a record snowfall year with about 669 inches that gave us a really long season. Our visitation was up slightly from last year, especially with our season pass holders.

The Quiksilver store in Mammoth

More encouraging is that the skiers coming were spending more on discretionary items they had quit buying before.

Retail was up 15% over last year. We saw a great increase from food and beverage, our ski school, and the other parts of our business, but the best is that we saw the strongest increase in business percentage-wise in retail, which was incredibly encouraging.

We closed on July 4th and there was still a lot of snow. We actually had to use snow removal equipment to open up our mountain bike parks this summer.

How did your season pass program do? 

Our MVP program was up a lot and we saw some great visitation increase from it. The MVP club is typically a closed pass program where only existing pass holders can purchase those passes for next season.

The program opens up every few years to new members when attrition brings the total number of pass holders low enough, so we opened it this past year. The MVP pass is our lowest-priced unrestricted season pass. This year we had a lot of pass holders bragging about getting in 160 days or more this year.

See Page 2 for changes coming next season