Should You Join a Ski Club?

Filed in archive Winter Adventures on November 13, 2007

Do you belong to a ski club? Have you even heard of one? If not, it seems they are all the range.

Over 300,000 skiers belong to the National Ski Council Federation, an organization represented by 28 regional councils. Their members are a combination of city folk, beach people who live away from the snow. And several times a year they get together and plan ski trips all over the world.

"Because we don't have mountains, we have to be organized in order to go and get the best dollar and buying power for our ski trips," said Michelle Moskowitz, president of the Florida Ski Council, which is one of the federation's biggest regional groups, with 16 member clubs from Pensacola to Miami.

The Florida clubs' marketing includes an ad that asks, "Where do we ski in Florida?" The answer is, "Anywhere you want," said Moskowitz.

In January, the Florida council will head to Heavenly, a ski resort in Lake Tahoe. Trips planned for 2009 include Snowmass, Colo., Cortina, Italy; Nagano, Japan, and Whistler in British Columbia, Canada, a year before the Winter Olympics are held there. In the past, Florida clubs have gone everywhere from St. Moritz, Switzerland, to Bariloche, Argentina, which, like Valle Nevado, Chile, offers skiing in August.

"There are skiers who in the summertime have a pent-up demand," said Patrick Rothe, a sales manager with Ski.com, which books group trips for the Florida council and other ski clubs. "By August, they really want to go skiing before our winter starts again."

Rothe said the interest in exotic ski destinations is being driven in part by more aggressive marketing by resorts in places like South America and New Zealand, and partly because there are more international flights available, so trips are easier to plan.

Popular domestic resorts include Aspen, Vail and Steamboat in Colorado; Jackson Hole, Wyo.; Big Sky, Mont.; Park City and Deer Valley, Utah, according to Rothe.