What is Himalayan Ski Village? How does it compare to other ski resorts in the Himalayas? What does the project say about the state of Indian tourism?

Himalayan Ski Village, the name itself, is pretty descriptive. The idea is to make a full destination resort village – that, of course, having an excellent ski facility. There are, at present, basically two semi-serious destinations in the Himalayas for skiing. One is in Gulmarg. It’s a very good hill, very good mountain, with a decent lift system. It does not have much in the way of hospitality in the base facilities. Kashmir puts up certain challenges to the traveler. Overall, it’s a good hill. Not much in the way of grooming equipment or, as I said, base facilities.

Then we have Auli in Uttaranchal, which is not really an excellent facility. There is very little, again, hospitality facilities. It is, I think, a 12-hour drive from the nearest major city. That’s a rugged drive through the Himalayas. The ski lift system was basically put on the wrong side of the hill. So it gets too much sun in the day and consequently you get freezing and melting.

I think the Himalayan Ski Village is really the first properly conceived and full-service ski village in the Himalayas. We brought in the hill designers from Vail. In fact, Mike Larson was Director of Design for Vail Associates for 22 years. He’s conceptualized and designed the entire ski hill facility. Jack Zehren came in to do the planning of the town, the village. Jack was the planner for Beaver Creek. He’s done extensions in Vail and Telluride. He’s done ski resorts worldwide. So he’s basically one of the more established resort community planners in the ski industry. I think he’s helping with Mammoth right now also.

So in terms of really an up-to-the-standard ski resort design, this is the first of its kind in the Himalayas. Gulmarg was designed 100 years ago by the British. It’s been added on a little bit but not much. The Himalayan Ski Resort is intended to celebrate and reflect the Himalayan culture. It is not a transplant of Switzerland or the Rocky Mountains into India. It’s a very organically-inspired design. The architecture is very true to the Indo-Tibetan style that we’d find in the Western Himalayas.

The approach to the hill is extremely reverent. This is not just a resort for the rich, although we have very high-end facilities, we also have midrange facilities. Our approach to the mountain is not all about showing off the latest gear. It’s really about having reverence for the mountain and treading on it as lightly as possible. We are, therefore, resisting snowmaking and a lot of other activities which may normally go on in a highly commercial ski resort.

Of course, we have a lot of terrain for the number of skiers we expect. The mountain should be quite sparsely populated for skiers. There would be a lot of open terrain and a lot of powder found on this mountain. Then of course it’s a year-round destination, just as the modern ski villages’ attempts to be nowadays, very much like Aspen or Zermatt one of many places which try to keep the tourism activity year-round. It’s actually pretty easy to do here because of the very hot summers we have in India, which drives people naturally up into the mountains. The village would be, probably, more populated and more popular in the summer season than in the winter.

There will be five hotels in various price ranges from say $100 a night up to $600 or $700 a night. Of course, there’d be the Presidential Suites which would be much higher than that. We’re very dedicated to bringing the local community and general prosperity the ski village will create. Towards that end, we’re building a major vocational training school. We’ve made a commitment to employ at least 70 percent of our people from the local communities. That’s quite a challenge, actually. It’s a lot more difficult than it may sound.

There’s a huge environmental and social consciousness in the very heart of this project. It is probably not as money driven as most ski resort developments would be these days. There’s a bit of idealism, I think, in the core founders’ minds of this, both myself and Alfred Ford. We’ve been involved, both, in the development of this.

I think it’ll have a mood and an approach to travel, providing a travel destination, that will fit very much into the needs of the 21^st Century. I would like to think that we would be leaders in responsible tourism. I think that will translate into a good business result as well. I believe that amongst educated people who often also seem to have money to travel, that they will be more and more demanding such types of destinations which provide an authentic, and I’ll use the word reverent, experience for the places that they’re visiting.

Again, it’s not about the latest silver fox fur coats, flying in with your Learjet, although our guest list may have such ability. This is really about appreciating and experiencing the awe-inspiring Himalayas. These mountains have created, let’s say epiphanies, in man since early time. Some of the greatest and deepest, profound philosophical thought has been thought up and written down in these mountains.

I think these are important things to respect and to carry forward into the modern times. That’s really very much a part of the ethics here. We’ll have great hotel and hospitality operators. We’ll have Taj, we’ll have Six Senses, we’ll have other major hotel chains. All the basic creature comforts are going to be well provided. Six Senses is coming in, which is a very, very high-end spa, boutique resort operator.

Getting the project off the ground has seemed to be fraught with political and maybe even religious issues. Based on your experience, what are the lessons for others in the travel industry who are looking to get involved in India?

Politics and politicians are often driven by negativity. They rarely bring any positive direction forward. There is a tendency to stir, especially the rural people, to stir them up into hysterical paranoia. We’ve certainly suffered that. We’ve been the Vietnam, you might say, between the different warring political parties. The party that supports us, we will be the ones attacked from the opposition. On every single account and the most amazing accusations are made against us.

It’s a heartbreaking, heart-rending and very costly process to bring a ski resort in under these circumstances. I think that we have not been well-served by having the image of bigness, although it is actually a small project by international standards. But because the Ford name is associated with it, and maybe because of the grandiose title “Himalayan Ski Village,” the opposition was able to paint us as the big monolithic, multinational, soulless company, which couldn’t be further from the truth if you buy in even partially to what I said earlier about our ethics and our idealism.

This is really a very personal expression of myself and Alfred Ford and a number of other promoters who are really, I suppose, children of the ‘60s who are looking to leave a legacy of value for the local population and just show a better way forward in tourism for the future. We really are conservationists and environmentalists at heart. We get painted quite a different way, even by so-called environmentalists.

So India is an argumentative and difficult environment. The politics of negativity reign supreme in India. It’s unfortunate because good things cannot easily happen here. I’ve developed resorts in America and Jamaica. I’ve been involved in Thailand. I’ve been involved in The Virgin Islands. I’ve been indirectly involved in a variety of other places through consulting. .It’s got to be one of the most difficult environments to develop such a project.

How do you plan to convince non-Indians to abandon Aspen or Switzerland and head to India to ski, and then how you convince Indians that they should be skiing and doing it in their own country?

I think that the Himalayas themselves have a huge appeal. There’s so many reasons why the Himalayas have a huge appeal. I think that one of the outstanding points for the skier is that the skiing is fabulous. The snow is relatively dry and relatively powdery. They’re very majestic and high mountains. We have all types of challenges from beginner to extreme, an abundance of terrain. We will have probably more skiable area than 70 percent of the ski resorts in the world. As we keep adding lifts over the next ten years, eventually we’ll probably be one of the biggest terrain areas.

So the quality of skiing, the incredible size and grandeur of the Himalayas, the flavor of the ski village itself, the Indo-Tibetan style of architecture and the atmosphere that’s here. It’s a very magical atmosphere. That will draw the international clientele. I think we’ll draw a lot from Japan and Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea. I think we’ll draw a lot of expats from the Middle East who are working there. Europeans will certainly come here. Our snow should last longer into this warming cycle than the Alps. We do expect to have generally better snow than what’s happening in Europe today. There are a number of reasons. Americans, I don’t know. I think that they will come for the excitement of coming to India and being in the Himalayas. .

Our business model really doesn’t depend heavily on foreign traffic, although I think we’ll get an abundance of it. I think the domestic market will more than keep us busy. There’s a large portion of India which is aspiring for quality travel experiences. Of course, they do go out of India. I think there’s maybe two or three times more Indians going out of India on holiday than there are actual tourists coming into India.

As the disposable income continues to increase, I’m sure they could afford to keep going back to Switzerland, in terms of money, but who can afford four or five trips abroad a year in terms of time? What’s going to happen is, yes, they’ll still go to Switzerland and they’ll still go to various other places, but they’re going to start wanting and demanding more and more international-quality holiday environments right here in their own country where they can zip away for a long weekend, that sort of thing.

We will be one of the very few such destinations. The gap between supply and demand in the resort world in India is probably greater than anywhere else in the world. There’s a huge shortage of vacation accommodations. On the other hand, there’s a huge demand from the domestic market itself. In addition, you have the non-resident Indians, the Indian Diaspora worldwide, who generally do come back to India every year or every other year. Many of them are well-to-do and have been picking up an interest in mountain experiences.

You have to keep in mind, that even in Vail, Colorado, which is a famous ski resort, only 30 percent of their guests in a year ski; 70 percent of their guests do not ski. Even in a place where there are a lot of serious skiers, the majority of people do not ski. Grandma comes along or the wife doesn’t ski or what have you. Just the experience of being in the mountains and seeing the snow and having a log fire on the fireplace and enjoying that mountain atmosphere is really the biggest driver.

We’ll also have an abundance of unskilled winter sports, such as tubing and things like that, snowshoe trails and what have you. We’re also building a very large Indian ski instructor team. We’ll have about 100 ski instructors to start bringing the India youth, especially, into winter sports. We’re also supporting the Indian Olympic ski team to start hopefully bagging some medals so that will inspire the Indians to believe in themselves, that they can ski.

As you know, skiing is more or less like riding a bicycle. Once you get the hang of the balance and kind of let yourself go into it, it’s not that hard. I think once they see fellow Indians successfully skiing and picking it up, more and more will start taking it up.

You’ve been in India for three decades now, directly or indirectly, and have found a place there. As someone who has a passion for India, what itinerary would you recommend to someone who wanted to see the best of the Himalayas outside of just one resort for a week or weekend?

I would say Bhutan, Ladakh, and the trekking around Manali and Parvati Valley. These are fabulous destinations. They are life-changing experiences. I would suggest whitewater rafting in Ladakh, on the Zanskar. I’d suggest trekking in Bhutan and trekking in the Himalayas around Manali and Parvati Valley can be very rewarding as well. There’s no bad place in the Himalayas. I’m just mentioning those. They’re accessible and they have some better facilities, better launching pads, and maybe some unique cultural aspects. I think the Zanskar is a great experience for the water rafting. It’s one of those great rivers that one should run. Nepal is still good, but sometimes it’s a little politically disturbed, but Nepal is still fabulous. It’s hard for me to say there’s any bad place because there isn’t.

It is. It’s a little bit wacky, it’s so ambitious. We really do want to leave a legacy. We’re definitely putting in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. It’s a tough row to hoe, but at the same time, we knew that when we started out. We’d like to leave something as a legacy that will inspire future generations to take up tourism in a more responsible way. I think by proving that this approach can also be a prosperous model is the most important thing.

It’s not just doing it, having a lot of money and dumping your money and showing that you can spend your money. That’s not the point. That’s not going to inspire anybody else. I think our challenge here is to design and execute this with the best environmental and social, most progressive thinking we can find and still have a prosperous, profitable model. If we can prove that responsible tourism can also be prosperous business, then that will leave a valuable legacy to inspire future trends in this same direction.