Issue of “bootleg” ski instructors raises host of questions

According to a report on SnoCountry.com, the U.S. Forest Service and some ski areas have taken steps to crack down on “bootleg” instructors on the slopes. That is, some people are going to large, commercial ski areas and offering their services as instructors, but bypassing the host snowsports school in the process.

Rather than showing up at a school and waiting to be paired up with a customer, these renegades solicit business via Craig’s List, word-of-mouth, and activities. Call it another case of disintermediation. In this case, it’s cutting out the middleman of the ski/snowboard school.

Customers, for their part, can see several benefits from such an arrangement. First, they probably pay less, since that is largely the point. While at Heavenly in March, I talked with a man who had arranged just such a lesson for his son; he said that he paid far less to the independent ski instructor than he would have paid to the Heavenly school. Second, they get to pick their instructor, rather than accept whomever the ski school assigns to them. (It is possible, of course, for a student to pick an instructor. It’s called a private lesson, but those are typically far more expensive than the group lessons arranged by the snowsports school.) Third, the customers of independent instructors get some flexibility in scheduling their lessons.

For the renegades,  the benefits are obvious, too. They don’t have to hand over a cut of their earnings to the snowsports school, and they can work when they want. Of course, they do have to convince customers that their services are worth the money, so the onus of marketing oneself falls on them, not the resort operator.

Aligned against the instructors are several parties. The most obvious are the snowsports schools. The second group school instructors who are not working independently, since the renegades are probably taking at least some of their business. The third is the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), which owns most of the land that resorts in the western U.S. use for their operations. The value of the payments it receives from a  ski operator depends in part on the revenue stream of that operator, which includes the school. Decrease the operator’s income, and the value of the lease declines. Finally, the association of professional instructors–the Professional Ski Instructors of America (PSIA) and the American Association of Snowboarding Instructors (AASI)–have an interest in staying on the good side of resort operators, even if some of their members are working independently. In fact, the associations have expressed their sympathies with the resorts in their business models. Not just anyone can take a test from the PSIA or AASI and become a certified instructor; candidates must be affiliated with a snowsports school. Most of those are owned by a resort operator; the rest (usually, traveling schools) make business deals with resorts.

So are the renegades right, wrong, or both?

If an instructor signs an agreement with a snowsports school that he will not give lessons outside the confines and arrangements of the school, and then does so anyway, he is in violation of a contract. The penalties called out by the contract should apply.

On the other hand, there are at least two strains of thought that could lend some sympathy to the renegades. The first is that most of these lessons are conducted on USFS–that is, public–land. Governments can and do control what happens on land that every citizen, in theory owns, but the argument that “it’s public land, the public should be able to use it however it wishes” has at least a tinge of populist appeal, though not legal standing. A second fact giving a bit of sympathy to the renegades is that roughly one-third of all American workers toil in jobs that require a license, a fact that some people use to argue that governments at all levels are too active in hindering a person’s right to learn a living. Occupational licensing, as Milton Friedman pointed out over 50 years ago, limits consumer choice, raises the incomes of the license holders (which is they like them), raises prices for the buyer, and interposes a third party into what could easily be a simple buyer-seller transaction.

So what do you think? Have you paid someone for a lesson, outside of a ski/snowboard school? Do you think resorts or the instructors in the right? Both? Neither. Feel free to offer up your comments