How Do Resorts Need to Change for Millennials?

The art of champagne sabrage dates back to a French military tradition from Napoleon’s era. These days, it’s more or less a party stunt involving slicing the top of a bottle of bubbly with a sword for dramatic effect.

And Leo Alsved, 27, is about to do it with a ski.

He’s on top of a snow-covered peak on Utah’s Powder Mountain on a sunny afternoon in late March, surrounded by two dozen heliskiers eager to play a few rounds of “champagne pong” before tipsily winding their way back down the slopes. He raises the ski as though it were a giant machete and swings it toward the bottle. The cork flies out, followed by a spray of champagne. There is applause.

Champagne for everyone! (Photo: Fabian Wester)

If this sounds like a moment staged for an Instagram photo, that’s because it was, more or less. Creating Instagram-worthy experiences is de rigueur at the Ski Week, where Alsved serves as CEO, and this may be one of the first companies to accurately tackle the very open and very debatable question: “How does the resort industry need to evolve for millennials?”

Indeed, the Ski Week operates as though it were checking a list of boxes for how to market to the under-35 set — something that’s been extremely murky for all-inclusive resorts and cruise lines that have struggled to reach this demographic. Travelers encouraged to book in groups of friends, rather than couples? Check. A deliberately international crowd? Check. A mobile app for sharing photos with everyone else on the trip? Check. A promise of hyperbolic experiences for the generation that professes to prefer “experiences” to “stuff?” Major emphasis on that check.

Attending the Ski Week can perhaps best be described as “Hot Tub Time Machine” meets Coachella. Party-ready friends book ski condos in groups (pricing starts at around $1,100 per person) for a full week of days on the slopes and wild après-ski parties (many of them costumed) with a crowd of fellow vacationers who have flown in from just about every corner of the world. It’s the snowier sibling of parent company European Travel Ventures’ (or ETV) the Yacht Week, a similar group travel series (except with yachts, not ski condos). ETV is less than a decade old, but its executives envision it as a global name in travel for the millennial generation — and early growth is promising.

How about we network in the hot tub? (Photo: Fabian Wester)

“We have 13,000 people at Yacht Week,” ETV co-founder Erik Biorklund said, referring collectively to the four dozen or so Yacht Week events held annually in the likes of Croatia, Thailand, Greece, and the British Virgin Islands. “That’s one-quarter the size of Burning Man, and just as loyal. People don’t buy a holiday, they buy an experience.”

That 13,000 figure is tiny when compared with the fact that over three and a half million people take Royal Caribbean cruises every year. But Biorklund is not joking about the loyalty; it’s fanatical on the level of “The Rocky Horror Show.” Attendees at the Ski Week at Powder Mountain in mid-March (which was ETV’s first event in the U.S.) boasted over beers and shots of Fireball just how many of ETV’s events they have been to. The company has been extraordinarily successful in word-of-mouth marketing, with nearly all of the 170-odd Ski Week-ers — who had come to Utah from as far as Brazil, Germany, and Australia — saying they had booked the trip after having previously gone on a Yacht Week or having known a friend who did. After its original Ski Week event last winter in Obertauern, Austria, Biorklund says a full half of attendees booked a trip for the following year.

Related: Young People Who Are Changing the World, One Train Trip at a Time

“I want to at least complete every [Yacht Week] route,” said Jason, a 28-year-old Ski Week-goer and seven-time Yacht Week alumnus in lime green sunglasses and a custom-made Yacht Week polo shirt at an afternoon “après” party. (He agreed to speak on the record on the condition that I disclose neither his last name nor the overseas U.S. Army base where he’s stationed as an officer; suffice it to say it is a very long flight from Utah.) “I’ve got Italy this summer, so now I’ve got Greece and Turkey still to do.”

These trips are absolutely, BYOC (Bring Your Own Costume). (Photo: Fabian Wester)

The unabashed Instagrammable goofiness of the Ski Week is easy to laugh at — in addition to “helicopter champagne pong,” activities included glowstick-heavy night skiing, a cowboy-themed costume party, and an Oktoberfest in March event that got so rowdy that several tables collapsed from the weight of lederhosen-clad people dancing on them. But with people like Jason willing to fly just about anywhere that ETV is hosting an event, the company certainly appears to be onto something. Especially since “how to market to millennials” is the subject of perpetual analysis in the travel industry, especially as more millennials enter the working world (and hence presumably the world of purchasing power) each day.

Millennials are well-documented to be more interested in traveling abroad than any prior generation. But they’re said to be more ambivalent to luxury than their elders are, would prefer to spend time with an internationally diverse crowd, and opt to travel with their friends. A recent study by Skift found that 84 percent of millennials don’t use travel agents at all. And that’s creating quite a bit of upheaval in the industry, with hotel companies creating boutique-themed chains for a generation that prefers Airbnb and cruise lines shuffling itineraries to stop at film festivals and foster other “cool experiences.”

Related: Millennials Lie at Work in Order to Travel More

“Due in part to technology and the Internet, [millennials] have grown up as global citizens and are more curious about what is out there,” explained Danielle Thornton, a former ad agency art director who is now the co-founder of WHOA Travel, a millennial-focused tour company that brings all-female groups together for experiences like summiting Kilimanjaro or visiting Bavaria for Oktoberfest. “They understand the power of travel, and it’s because of that they expect more out of travel experiences. By more, I don’t mean fancy hotels or the luxuries they’re used to at home, I mean more substance.”

Thanks to economic conditions and changing social norms, millennials are settling down with significant others later than ever, creating a new target customer for the travel industry: too affluent for the bargain-basement spring break, but not yet at a point where he or she wants to be at a sheltered, all-inclusive resort. Tour companies like Contiki and G Adventures have successfully attracted the younger generation for everything from European city tours to mountain treks, but the resort sector of the industry — including skiing — continues to struggle to attract them. (Appropriately, Ski Week venue Powder Mountain is under the ownership of a cadre of millennial entrepreneurs who have put kale salads on the lodge menus and host EDM concerts on the slopes.)

Related: The Millennial’s Guide to Surviving Your First Business Trip

If ETV hopes to grow its “Weeks,” as well as other initiatives in the next few years, there will undoubtedly be growing pains. The company benefits immensely from its friends-and-family vibe, and that’s difficult to scale; ubiquity of a brand can easily erode the “authenticity” that travel marketers crave in their attempts to reach millennials. And many of its brand loyalists will soon reach a point where their resort tastes don’t involve dance parties on yachts or glow-stick night skiing.

Millennials are craving authenticity. (Photo: Fabian Wester)

“We’re getting older and our customers are getting older with us,” Leo Alsved said, pointing out that the average age of Yacht Week attendees has gone from 22 to 28 since he joined the company in 2008, originally as a yacht skipper. “Now, we are getting to a point where either we need to transform the product or we say, OK, Yacht Week is here, and here is a newer product.” That might be Yachts & Friends, a standalone yacht-booking service that ETV operates and markets to a somewhat older audience, or it might be something yet to launch.

Or, perhaps, ETV will be able to count on the fact that there are always people willing to get a little bit crazy. At one of the après parties at the top of Powder Mountain, a pair of Australians in their late 30s admitted they felt like they were older than anyone else in sight — right before one of them took out an iPhone to film the other “surfing” down a snowboard quarter-pipe on a plastic sled, commenting, “I’ve seen this guy ride a motorbike off the roof of his house.”

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