Roxbury, NY – A Central Catskills Chamber of Commerce program to provide buy-one, get-one free (BOGO) lift tickets to ski or snowboard at the state-owned Belleayre Mountain Ski Center in Highmount, N.Y., has the owners of one neighboring ski area crying foul.nLaszlo and Danielle Vajtay, owners of Ski Plattekill in nearby Roxbury, allege that the deal unfairly siphons off visitors to their resort. And Danielle Vajtay has threatened to quit her position on the Chamber’s Executive Committee over the rift.
The Chamber began its promotion this month by handing out 1,000 Belleayre BOGO vouchers to its member businesses, asking them to distribute the vouchers to customers who spend $50 or more. Plattekill, the other ski area within the Chamber’s region, was not asked to participate, nor was Danielle Vajtay even aware of the Chamber’s program even though she’s a member of its Executive Committee.
“Danielle was never informed that this was going to take place. She was selectively left out of the discussions, in fact so were most of the other board members,” Plattekill co-owner Laszlo Vajtay said this week. “This was a back room deal made with Tony Lanza at Belleayre, and Belleayre is just as much at fault for maliciously and deliberately doing whatever they can to siphon off our business right here in our backyard. In fact, as a member business we should have been sent these BOGO vouchers as well to Belleayre but we were conveniently left off of that list as well.”
Belleayre is operated by the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and unlike the other privately owned and operated ski resorts in the area, receives a substantial portion of its operating funds from the New York state budget to help cover an annual operating loss that totaled $1 million last winter and $76,000 the year before. While privatization of Belleayre has been discussed on occasion over the years, no serious effort to place the ski area in the hands of private operators has ever been considered.
“It is very disturbing that the chamber has seen nothing wrong with having all the local chamber businesses handing out free ski tickets to one ski facility in our chamber region when there are two ski centers in the chamber region,” Plattekill co-owner Danielle Vajtay wrote in a letter to Chamber Executive Director Carol O’Beirne. “This does not exactly make for good feelings on the part of the ‘other’ ski center who happens to be a chamber member and board member too. It also does not bear well when we have local community businesses asking us how we feel about the fact that they have been given Belleayre BOGOs to pass out to their customers (including businesses that are also Plattekill lodging partners who are put in a hard position of what to offer guests). Was any thought given to the impact this promotion might negatively have on Plattekill since our skiers go to the same local area businesses as Belleayre skiers?”
The Central Catskills Chamber of Commerce nonetheless plans to print additional Belleayre BOGO vouchers for distribution. Danielle Vajtay indicates that she’ll resign her post on the Chamber’s Executive Committee immediately if the program is not dropped. And Laszlo Vajtay says that they couldn’t participate in the program even if they’d been offered the chance.
“All I can say is do the math, it doesn’t work,” he said this week. “We have a bottom line to answer to. We simply can’t give away skiing for free. And we can’t compete with free. And it is absurd that the state would do this at the expense of the taxpayer of New York State. What country do we live in? Where is the transparency?”
This isn’t the first time that free lift tickets at Belleayre have caused a Catskill brouhaha. Hunter Mountain and Windham Mountain, two other Catskill region ski areas, late in 2010 filed a Freedom of Information Law request and determined that 10 percent of Belleayre’s lift tickets are given away for free, roughly five times the industry average, according to Scott Brandi of the trade group Ski Areas of New York.
“When handed this surprise gift of a free lift ticket (area visitors) are changing their skiing plans and going to where it is free,” Laszlo Vajtay complains. “We have families that are loyal to Plattekill who were handed up to six BOGOs because that is how many were in their group, and they simply stopped for a few dollars of supplies along the way. They brought their BOGOs to us and said they won’t need them. In fact there are some business establishments standing in solidarity with us and who will also be canceling their memberships with the Chamber and will destroy the BOGO vouchers they received in the mail. Why discount and cheapen the product and make this area feel like a Wal-Mart skiing region?”