How Vail’s budding relationship with its sister resort in Austria will bring innovation to both resort communities
Last week, amid the backdrop of the GoPro Mountain Games in Vail, the town had a visiting delegation from its newest sister city, St. Anton Am Arlberg in Austria.
“We built some pretty cool relationships. Just like Vail, the people that are involved are really passionate about their community. We have a lot of similarities and a lot of passions for the outdoors and wild places and sports,” said Vail Town Council member Barry Davis. “Having them here was fantastic … and it’s really easy to fall back in love with Vail when you’re showing it off to someone.”
St. Anton is now the third resort community that Vail has a formal peer resort relationship with, the other two being St. Moritz, Switzerland, and Yamanouchi-Machi, Nagano Prefecture, Japan. The goal of such relationships, according to Mia Vlaar, the town’s economic development director, is to share and learn from other mountain resort communities.
With St. Anton, the goal — as formalized in a resolution and memorandum approved by the Vail Town Council on June 6 — is to collaborate on sustainability, tourism, municipal services, fire protection, education, culture, parking and transit, housing, workforce as well as community exchange programs and efforts.
While the relationship was formalized during last week’s visit from St. Anton officials, it kicked off last winter when members of the Vail staff and Town Council visited the Austrian municipality.
“We had a great time last winter with the members of the delegation from Vail in St. Anton. During these days, we felt we somehow belonged together because we feel the same, we have the same atmosphere, we have maybe the same ideas and it is time to work together on different themes,” said St. Anton Mayor Helmut Mall at the June 6 Town Council meeting.
A similar feel
The resemblance between St. Anton and Vail is immediately obvious in the architecture alone. Davis, who has among the Vail group that visited last year, said that there have been rumors that Vail was originally modeled after St. Anton.
“After going there and seeing it, I can see how that’s true,” Davis said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to visit some other European ski towns and St. Anton really has a very Vail feel to it.”
However, this “Vail feel” isn’t limited to architecture.
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“I was kind of blown away last year just watching their main strip — which would be our Bridge Street — the families, guests, shop owners, just talking to people, we had a lot of similarities,” Davis said. “With the exception of speaking a different language, it very much felt like you could kind of spot the locals and be like, oh, that’s a St. Anton local, and it could be a Vail local too.”
Vail Council member Pete Seibert, who also visited St. Anton, remarked that the commonalities and relationship will help drive both places forward.
“There are certain ski areas that have always been known as among the best. St Anton and Vail are two of them,” he said. “And if you want to maintain your position, you need to be sure you’re keeping up. And if you don’t look out past your immediate boundaries, you run the risk of not keeping up.”
And while the two places share many positive attributes, they also connect on challenges.
“We all face similar challenges and can learn from each other in innovative approaches to these mountain resort issues,” Vlaar said.
Town Manager Russ Forrest commented that with “similar tourist-based communities,” it will be helpful to share “each other’s paradigms of how we find that balance in terms of supporting our community and our tourism economy.”
During the St. Anton visit, Seibert said the two municipalities talked about many challenges, including housing. This was an opportunity for Vail to share its recent creativity and progress, namely with Timber Ridge, he added.
“You don’t know what they might be working on that would help us in terms of attracting summer business and those sorts of things. I think just having that connection and that open line of communication is important,” Seibert said.
Learning from each other
Sharing ideas and differences is the ultimate goal of such peer-resort partnerships.
“In Europe, in terms of topics around sustainability, they’re far ahead of us,” Forrest said. “However, it was interesting. We were talking about affordable housing, and they were really curious about what we were doing. And we were probably far ahead of them in terms of creating affordable housing and creating and developing housing policy. So those opportunities to share ideas and different paradigms and learn from each other.”
From smaller differences like the number of Council members to how public comment is incorporated to broader ideas about culture, events and sustainability, Vail’s council members and staff see numerous opportunities to learn.
To Davis, one thing that stands out is the way that St. Anton has continued to modernize while staying true to its brand and DNA.
“Having been a tourist destination since 1901, they have a much more elevated experience than us. And I think that while we have a rich, kind of cool history, I like to be reminded that we are young,” Davis said.
At this point in time in Vail’s history, this is a good perspective to have, he added.
“As we’re trying to preserve some of our DNA — and be Vail and be different from any other ski town — I think that they are a great model. Their brand is definitely intact; they’re still very St. Anton,” Davis said.
“They have modern architecture, historical architecture, but they’ve done a great job of keeping the St. Anton feel alive. And I think that should be encouraging to us, that we can change and evolve and still be uniquely Vail.”
This perspective of “how to evolve and stay competitive and yet stay true to your roots, we couldn’t have a better partner,” Davis added. “That probably comes with the fact that they’ve been in the game for over 120 years.”
Like Vail, St. Anton has a vibrant ski culture. However, the ski business is different. Forrest commented that the ski operator is a family business that started the ski area in 1938. And on the mountain, there are multiple ski schools and private restaurants, he added.
“I think the most fascinating thing for me about St. Anton was just how all the different players work together,” Davis said. “In Vail, we have the town and we have Vail Resorts. But there, they have things come together very differently. Things on the mountain may be owned individually and then they have a company that owns the lifts and then they still work with the towns … I see a lot of opportunities to learn from each other.”
And St. Anton’s ski culture is one that fully embraces après ski.
“We’d like to see Vail get re-energized in town with après ski,” Seibert said. “They almost have the other end of the problem. They have a couple of big restaurant bars up on the mountain, but people stop there and the party is big; it pours out onto the slope and then people filter down into town at all hours. But I think what I heard from (St. Anton) is, careful what you wish for.”
Davis commented that with the après ski culture, it’s the perfect example of how they can learn from each other: “They feel like they have too much of a good thing. We might feel like we could step that up a little bit.”
As the two communities prepare to collaborate into the future, the foundation of the partnership is ultimately the relationships forged.
“I think that it’s absolutely important to fill this partnership with life, to fill it with themes, to fill it with discussion, but also with friendship and togetherness,” Mall said.