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ABSTRACT
Vail Valley with two large ski areas, Vail and Beaver Creek, has become one of the most highly recognized tourist destination areas in Colorado. Vail and Beaver were awarded to host the World Alpine Ski Championships in 1989, 1999 and 2015. Vail’s transformation from a small attractive ski area with an alpine inspired village to an upscale four-season resort environment along an urbanized corridor of 50 miles (70 km) is shown with comparative data. In a close-up section, the growth and change of The Town of Vail is reconstructed from the 1960s to 2010. The tourist area life cycle model, the path metaphor in evolutionary economic geography and the concept of resilience are applied to explaining the growth dynamics in Vail Valley. Vail Resorts as a leading agent of change in the further globalization of the ski resort industry has at last embraced sustainability.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rudi Hartmann
Dr. Rudi Hartmann is a Professor (C/T) at the University of Colorado Denver where he has taught geography and tourism planning since 1992. A long-time interest of his is the study of resort development in mountain environments. He has closely examined the growth and change of winter sports destinations in the State of Colorado.
Shelley Broadway
Shelley Broadway is a graduate of the Master of Engineering program at the University of Colorado Denver. Her master’s research focused on using a geographic information system to visualize growth and map development trends over time. She now user her expertise in geospatial analysis at the Colorado Department of Transportation developing interactive web applications and managing location data that help support a safe and efficient multi-modal system.