Ski change | Mark Hall is the new director of development for Sunday River and Sugarloaf
In August, Boyne USA Resorts, the largest family-owned resort company in the country, entered the Maine market when it acquired Sunday River in Bethel and Sugarloaf/USA in Carrabassett Valley. The $77 million purchase from American Skiing Co., made possible through financing from CNL Properties in Florida, is part of Boyne's new coast-to-coast expansion plan that includes boosting its portfolio of resorts to 10 and its skier count to approximately 3.6 million a year, positioning itself as the third largest ski resort conglomerate in the country.
This likely means big changes at Sunday River and Sugarloaf, and Mark Hall, the new director of development for Boyne's Maine resorts, is at the center of that change. Hall is leading an envisioning process that will take a broad look at Sunday River and its future to determine what it and Sugarloaf should look like decades down the line. He's hired an outside consultant to create an emotion-based story for Sunday River of where it's been, where it is and where it's headed. This narrative picture of the future, a process that is unlike anything Boyne has ever done for its other resorts, is designed to help this company new to the Maine market get familiar with the larger of the two resorts and the communities they serve.
Hall, the former vice president of development for the northeast U.S. holdings of Intrawest, a resort developer and manager based in Canada, was hired by Boyne in late November. A former Sugarloaf skier, Hall makes a weekly commute from his home near Stratton Mountain in Vermont to his office at Sunday River. The bulk of his work time is spent overseeing "story planning" — think the dreamer's version of strategic planning. Boyne executives, senior staff at the resort and resort homeowners last month gathered with others involved or invested in Sunday River to brainstorm about the future of the resort, or, as Hall describes it, how to make Sunday River "socially, environmentally and economically sound." A British Columbia firm Hall had worked with at Intrawest, Envisioning + Storytelling, will create a Sunday River "strategic story," a plan for the future that reads like a novel. Hall chose this method because it encourages a wider variety of input than a traditional strategic planning process. He intends to make that story public by the end of February, and integrate it into the resort's master plan over the next four to five months.
Hall also is concurrently conducting what he calls a more "informal" internal review at Sugarloaf, which has fewer developable acres than Sunday River. At both resorts, Hall will focus on increasing four-season offerings, which he thinks is critical to making the resorts profitable in a region with unreliable snow patterns and stiff competition. "We think that it's going to be important to have a four-seasons presence at each resort in order for them to, in the long term, have that thrivability," Hall says.
Sunday River and Sugarloaf could use the creative juice. While ski resorts contribute about $300 million annually to the Maine economy, they've also seen visitor rates decline by more than 12% over the last five years, according to the Ski Maine Association.
Though Hall says Boyne is waiting for Sunday River's story to develop an integrated plan to develop both resorts, the company does intend to make changes to Sunday River and Sugarloaf in the next 24 months independent of the story planning, including upgrading snowmaking capacity and chair lifts, bringing back mountain biking, and building more residential units at both resorts.
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