What Operators Learned When the Snow Didn’t Come

Hal Conick
7/13/2026

This past winter was the second warmest in U.S. history, according to climate records dating back to 1895. It was so warm that Durk Johnson, general manager for Northwest Vacations, recalled seeing ice sculptures melting at Lake Chelan’s Winterfest.

Chelan, Washington, isn’t a ski destination in the traditional sense, but that same warmth that melted their ice sculptures also hurt destination skiing across the western states.

Snowpack across Colorado, Utah, and most of the region also hit historic lows. In some states, it was the lowest on record.

For vacation rental operators in these markets, it was a stress test. Many were forced to answer the question: What do we do when the guests come to ski but there’s no skiing?

Few had a better view of that than Lee Sims, vice president of marketing for Winter Park Lodging Company and Steamboat Lodging Company in Colorado, as well as Big Sky Vacations in Montana. These are luxury properties, welcoming visitors who come specifically to ski. Everyone in the region had a tough year, Sims says, especially operators in Colorado.

The 2024-2025 ski season across western mountain resorts ended with softer visitation than operators had hoped. Across the region, occupancy fell 0.5% compared to the previous year, according to data from Inntopia, which tracks lodging performance across roughly 28,000 units in 17 mountain destination communities.

Vail Resorts reported an even starker picture: Skier visits across its 37 North American resorts dropped nearly 15% year over year, with Rocky Mountain visits down 25%. The company attributed the decline to record-low snowfall and historically bad temperatures.

The season ended earlier than expected for some resorts. Steamboat closed a week ahead of schedule, Sims says. Winter Park, which aims to ski into May, didn’t make it that far.

Big Sky, a fly-to market where guests plan and commit months in advance, held up reasonably well, Sims says. But Colorado and Montana had two different winters.

The issues were more with quality than volume. Colorado got roughly 200 inches of snow, about 66% of a typical year, a steep drop, but not enough to doom operators. But the big powder days that define a great ski season—the kind Steamboat Springs has trademarked as “champagne powder,” giving skiers something of a carbonated feeling in their noses—simply never came. Instead, warm spells arrived early, thinning the snowpack and turning February skiing into something that felt more like April.

“You don’t want to start your day on spring slush,” Sims says. “You always want to end your day on spring slush.”

And in Winter Park, a drive-to market for the Denver metro area, it typically depends on last-minute bookings from locals willing to make the hour-long trip up when conditions look good. This past season, they often didn’t.

“When it’s 70 degrees in Denver, it’s hard to want to go skiing in the mountains,” Sims says. “And when the snow quality is poor, you don’t want to spend the money to get up there.”

This past year’s low-snow season serves as an example of a challenge that vacation rental operators across the country now often face: weather volatility.

In the Pacific Northwest, the threat expresses itself as fire and smoke. Johnson watches the fire season the way Colorado operators watch the snowpack. When wildfires break out in the national forests surrounding Lake Chelan, smoke fills the valley and guests start calling, wondering if it’s still OK to visit. Worse yet, the perception can impact business just as much as truly dire fires.

“The biggest challenge is what happens with the news media saying that Chelan’s on fire when it’s not,” Johnson says.

It’s a dynamic that scientists say will only intensify. Large and severe fires in the Pacific Northwest are associated with warm and dry conditions, projected to occur with increasing frequency as the climate warms. One study from Oregon State University projected that wildfire risk in the region could double by 2035.

In the Southeast, the seasonal threat is hurricanes. Bashar Omar, who works with vacation rental operators across the Gulf Coast and Atlantic markets as part of his role at RentalGuardian, has watched as repeated severe hurricane seasons drive operator interest in travel protection products the following year.

A Climate Central analysis found that climate change increased the intensity of roughly 80% of Atlantic hurricanes between 2019 and 2023. Most storms reached intensities approximately one category higher than they would have been without recent changes to the climate.

The hazards differ by region, but the underlying business problem is the same: How do operators protect revenue, owners, and guests when the weather simply doesn’t cooperate?

Making the Best of a Bad Season

When the weather didn’t cooperate this past season, vacation rental managers had to make quick decisions.

For Sims, the first lever to pull was revenue management. Her teams held weekly meetings across all three brands, monitoring search volume and booking trends through Key Data, a hospitality analytics platform. When the data showed demand softening, they lowered rates, she says, dropping rates to their lowest levels since before the pandemic.

“We do have to get these rates low so that people would be enticed to come up and ski,” Sims says.

Most homeowners understood, but a handful had rate floors they wouldn’t budge on—and that’s their prerogative, Sims says. But the majority were flexible, in part because she could show them the market data. If their properties were booking better than comparable listings in the same area, that was the most persuasive argument available. It’s hard to argue with reality.

With a 60-day cancellation policy in place, most guests who had already booked were committed and came anyway. That gave Sims’s teams a clearer picture of who was arriving and what they needed, allowing her team to focus on perfecting the in-home experience rather than chasing new bookings.

Midway through the season, Sims made another adjustment to one- and two-bedroom condos and townhomes at Winter Park, loosening the cancellation policy to stimulate bookings. It helped a bit, but the snow quality was often the ceiling on visits, rather than any policy change.

With guests spending more time indoors than on the slopes, Sims says that the guest experience teams became the frontline of the operation. They redirected guests toward local activities, stocked homes with snacks, games, and wine, and kept properties in top condition. At Steamboat, a shuttle program normally used to ferry skiers to the mountain became the star of the show. It had one of its busiest years on record, frequently carrying guests downtown.

“I give so much credit to our guest experience and vacation planning teams,” Sims says. “They’re the ones who have to deal with the calls. They’re the ones who have to really be honest, tell the hard truth, and make people’s very expensive vacations still fun.”

Not every market suffered equally. Steamboat Springs proved more resilient than Winter Park, in part because it has a more robust downtown. Its restaurants, shops, and activities gave guests reasons to leave the house even when the skiing is poor.

The effort paid off in reviews, according to Sims. Guests who had a bad snow experience sometimes said so in reviews, then lauded the company in the very next line. The snow wasn’t great, the reviews would note, but the shuttle picked us up every time, or the house was perfect.

“We can’t control the weather,” Sims says. “But we can control almost everything else.”

Flexibility Is Now the Baseline

The pandemic changed what guests expect when they book a vacation. Major online travel agencies, such as Airbnb and Vrbo, were a big reason, as they competed on flexibility and allowed cancellations days or even hours before arrival. Guests noticed, and their expectations shifted.

“Major OTAs have really pushed hard on flexible cancellation policies,” Omar says. “They spoiled the guests.”

Many guests are willing to pay more for a booking they can cancel without penalty, Omar says. For operators with rigid 60- or 90-day cancellation policies, they may not even show up in the search of a guest who has flexibility as a high priority. Guests who find a more flexible listing nearby will often choose it, even at a higher rate.

But flexibility creates its own tension, particularly for smaller operators, as many of their homeowners depend on rental income to cover mortgage payments. Telling an owner that a guest can cancel two weeks out isn’t an easy conversation for vacation rental managers. Omar often hears the same phrase in response from operators: “I have to run this by the homeowner.”

“The homeowner is telling me, ‘You have to stay on a strict cancellation policy, because I need this money for my mortgage,’” he says.

Johnson encountered this dynamic differently. Rather than overhauling his cancellation policy, Northwest Vacations built flexibility into its operations through a one-time reservation change. If conditions weren’t right, due to smoke, fire, or weather, guests can shift their dates without losing their money. It costs the company some insurance revenue, Johnson says, but the payoff is loyalty.

“It’s a long-tail program,” Johnson says. “We’re more concerned with people wanting to come back.”

Protection as a Business Strategy

As guests have demanded more flexibility and the changing weather events have added uncertainty, travel insurance has become an important tool for vacation rental operators.

The global travel insurance market was valued at $23.8 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $132.9 billion by 2034, according to Allied Market Research. This was driven in part by travelers seeking protection against weather-related disruptions and other unexpected events.

There’s a distinction between two different products serving two different needs, Omar says. Travel insurance is guest-facing. It’s an optional add-on at booking that reimburses travelers when covered events—such as illness, weather, or trip interruption—force a cancellation. What many operators don’t realize, Omar says, is that standard travel insurance policies already include provisions for low-snow conditions. If a resort closes for more than eight hours due to inadequate snowpack, guests with travel insurance may be eligible for trip interruption coverage.

“It’s not just cancel for any reason,” Omar says. “Lack of snow is already included.”

Guests can add travel insurance up to 24 hours before departure, Omar says, giving operators a long window to encourage protection even after the initial booking.

Savvier operators aren’t just offering insurance at checkout. Some operators embed travel insurance links in their terms and conditions and follow up with guests after booking, Omar says, reminding them to protect their investment before it’s too late.

Flexible cancellation insurance products, like Booking Guardian, work differently than travel insurance. Rather than protecting the guest, he said that it protects the operator. When a property manager adopts the program, it applies to all bookings, allowing them to offer more flexible cancellation terms while filing a claim if a reservation can’t be rebooked or is rebooked at a lower rate. It’s a way for operators to compete on flexibility without asking homeowners to absorb the financial risk of a last-minute cancellation.

Omar sees both products as a necessity in modern travel, not an optional add-on. “Not only to protect your guests, but to protect your bottom line and protect your homeowners,” he says.

The same shift is coming from the demand side, Sims says. After a rough season, she expects guests to seek out protection in greater numbers. “I would say after a very bad winter like this—or after a very intense hurricane season—travel insurance for the next year sells very well,” she says. “People saw what happened. They’re going to protect themselves.”

For operators who haven’t yet made travel protection a priority, Omar says that they can’t wait for another bad season to start the conversation with homeowners. The weather isn’t getting any more predictable, he says.

Prepare Now for the Next Bad Season

Before the tough winter, the operators who would go on to navigate this season well had already invested in the right people, the right systems, and the right relationships. As always, the fundamentals carry operators through good times and help them survive bad times.

For Sims, the biggest takeaway was the value of guest experience staff. When conditions are poor and guests are spending more time in their rentals than on the slopes, the people answering the phones and stocking the homes matter more than ever.

“A high level of guest experience, a high-service guest experience team, is worth every penny,” she says. “Your operations teams are keeping the guests happy when the snow and the weather are not.”

Looking ahead, Sims plans to push travel insurance harder and start marketing winter bookings earlier, as soon as July. She wants to get in front of guests before they have too much time to dwell on last season’s conditions. She’s also watching the resort marketing calendars closely. When ski resorts invest in promotional packages and incentive passes, operators like her can piggyback on that momentum.

The lesson for Johnson was about removing friction at every step. Flexible length of stay, the right rate at the right time, strong social media presence, and staff with the right attitude. His markets didn’t suffer from the snow drought the way Colorado did, but the same principles apply regardless of what the weather throws at you.

“It’s good old-fashioned hospitality,” Johnson says. “How do we have a good product, how do we have great staff to take care of that product, and how do we make sure we have the right rate at the right time in the right place?”

No matter the market and no matter the weather risk, Omar says that operators need to stop thinking of protection products as optional extras. It’s time to start building them into their standard offering, for their guests, their homeowners, and themselves.

There was at least one unexpected bright spot from the difficult ski season. With fewer guests heading to the mountains, operators with properties in both ski and warm climates said that beach markets saw a bump. Operators with properties in coastal markets reported stronger-than-usual spring break traffic as travelers who might otherwise have gone skiing looked for an alternative.

The mountains will almost certainly get their snow back, but the lessons taught by this season will outlast the drought. Vacation rental managers must be prepared for weather volatility. Those who understand that uncertainty is the new baseline will be well positioned when the next bad season arrives.

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