Index

  Index  

  List of illustrations  iii

  List of abbreviations  iv

1.  Introduction  1

2.  Features of ski resorts  2

3.  Structure of the controlling in ski resorts  3

3.1  Strategic and Operative Controlling  3

3.1.1  Strategic Controlling  3

3.1.2  Operative Controlling  3

3.2  Controlling in the organizational structure  4

3.3  Controlling process in ski resorts  5

3.3.1  Timing  5

3.3.2  Planning course in ski resorts  6

3.4  Costing and revenue accounting  6

3.4.1  Cost sections  6

3.4.2  Cost system  7

3.4.3  Revenue accounting  8

4.  Controlling-tools  8

4.1  Marginal costing  8

4.2  Activity based costing  9

4.3  Capital budgeting  9

4.4  Benchmarking  10

4.5  Yield management  11

4.6  Further tools  12

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Index

5.  Information resource Management  13

5.1  Electronic Data Processing (EDP)  13

5.2  Reporting and ratios  13

6.  Conclusion  15

  List of references  16

  Attachments  18

  Attachment A: Functional account chart of a ski resort company  18

  Attachment B: Dynamical capital expenditure account method  19

  Bibliography  20

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List of abbreviations

List of abbreviations  

a. o. and others  

BPR Business Process Reengineering  

BZB Bayrische Zugspitzbahn AG  

Cf. compare  

ch. chapter  

Ebitda Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization  

EDP Electronic Data Processing  

e. g. exempli gratia  

etc. etcetera  

m meters above sea level  

p. page  

PwC PricewaterhouseCoopers AG  

iv

List of illustrations

  List of illustrations  

  Chart 1: Contents of the strategic Controlling  3

  Chart 2: Contents of the operative Controlling  4

  Chart 3: Model of a ski resort planning process  6

  Chart 4: Selected ratios for Austria  11

  Chart 5: Selected benchmark (Austria): Lift turnover per customer  11

  Chart 6: Extract of the main season tariffs at Axamer Lizum Austria  12

iii

Daniel Effenberger, Matr.-nu. 156359

(Bayrische Zugspitzbahn AG, annual report 2000/ 2001)

1. Introduction

In the last 50 years winter sport became a major economical size in mountain regions, especially in the European Alps and the Rocky Mountains. Until 1979 a lot of new ski resorts were developed. At the beginning of the 80´s the politicians intervened in the wild extension in the Alps and organized the development of this natural space. The rapid expansion was finished. ¹ In the 80´s and 90´s, the enterprises began to integrate further parts of the value chain. Pure lift operators became big ski resort companies. From the beginning of the 90´s the growth of winter sportsmen stagnated. ² In total there are about 32 million skiers in Europe. ³ Nowadays it is nearly impossible to open new resorts. Consequently the ski resort companies are more asked to improve their services, make up combinations with other resorts, built up cooperations or downsize the companies to compete with other ski resorts in the mountains. This market is really hard battled and the suppliers try to find their niches like family-, pure sport- or snowboard resorts. They started to concentrate on their core competencies at the end of the 90´s and invested huge amounts of money to upgrade the important transport possibilities like chair lifts or gondolas in the whole re-sorts.

Most of the smaller and middle sized ski resorts work with deficit. ⁴ This made it extremely important in the 90´s for businesses to introduce new divisions in the organizational structure to control and support the management. ⁵ Nowadays only about 50 percent of the ski resorts know Controlling as a division of the management; there-fore they often invest money without knowing the affects of it. ⁶ The increasing importance of Controlling in ski resorts is shown by the fact that PwC Switzerland has got an own team for this subject.

Due to the shortness of this seminar paper there is only a coarse outline of the subject with a focal point on medium and big sized companies represented with it.

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Daniel Effenberger, Matr.-nu. 156359

2. Features of ski resorts

Ski resorts are very complex systems. As mentioned ⁷ ski resorts integrated a lot of objects around the winter holiday industry in their area. These companies own a lot of value added services around the ski lifts, as there are:

^ Hotels

^ Gastronomy

^ Ski schools

^ Shops

^ Feeder roads 8

^ Etc.

Ski resorts are often owned by the local community, the federal state or with shares by private persons or other companies. They have got an effect on the whole region around the holiday area. Their characteristics are high fix costs, as a result of a cost intensive lift infrastructure, which has also got a long term amortization. ⁹ Snow is the most essential material in ski resorts; therefore a lot of slopes were made from artificial snow. ¹⁰ This problem will be worse in future as the snow boundary will rise up to 1800 m, caused by the global warming. ¹¹ Slope safety is also a high cost factor because deaths caused by avalanches combined with bad press can influence the turnover on a long term. Another significant cost factor is the new conditions for fire protection in the means of transport after the disaster of Kaprun in 2001. ¹² The marginal costs in total are relatively small compared with the fix costs. Due to this reason there is a high importance filling up the capacity limit to realize economies of scale. ¹³ This capacity is the ultimate limit and it is not possible to boost this at short term. They are also marked with very high fluctuations in demand. There is an extremely higher demand on weekends than on weekdays and it also varies in the summer and during the winter season. 14

It is possible and very important to segment the customers. There are different users of the alpine infrastructure in the summer and in the winter season. In the summer season mostly elder hikers visit the mountains and in the winter it is the sport interested client. ¹⁵ So, as in most service industries, it is important to concentrate on the customers as there is a high substitution for them. The most important factor for getting an excellent yield is the weather, and it is not possible to influence this aspect.

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