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  • SnowJapan Admin

Even though there were rumours of someone coming in to buy the resort a few years ago, Arai is still owned by the original owners.

 

The facilities are basically as they were. The hotel is being 'looked after' in a basic sense, but the ski lifts and skijo facilities are apparently just basically being left and of course getting older by the year without any kind of maintenance.

 

According to our friend over in the Myoko tourism office, there is currently no prospect of seeing the resort re-open. At least certainly not in the near future, but there is the worry that if it gets left too long then the facilities won't be up to it.

 

A sad story.

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Good terrain, stoopid amounts of snow, forward thinking managament. Why was it so much more to operate than other resorts LM? A helipad (standard at most international resorts) and underground tunnels don't cost money once they are built. Heated plaza? do you mean the ground?

That place seemed to be thinking outside the Jbox but it was tough to get customers for them...I guess a few hundred more crap resorts need to shut down first so that the good ones will have a fighting chance.

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You obviously know next to nothing about Arai, Black Diamond.

 

For a bit of education on the heated plaza

http://www.snowjapan.com/e/features/setting-journals-index.html

 

Forward thinking management? People could always call irresponsible management that if they wanted, it kind of covers all those mad ideas with some kind of positive spin, but the reality is that it was simply way out there and badly run. Not "forward thinking management"

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Actually Iiyamadude, I read all those articles when they came out (so I do know a little) but thanks for the link. I was referring to the differences (forward thinking) like the fact that they had a foriegner doing these write ups and promo way back in 2004 and the fact that they were trying to open and control the backcountry and explained things. There are a lot of resorts that are "way out there" that are still around. Tomamu is a perfect example. It has gone through a couple of ownership changes but the new marketting seems to be working. If Tomamu can somehow do it, why couldn't Arai be viable in the future?

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I would wager a bet that Arai was by far the most wasteful resort in Japan. I suppose some people called that heated plaza forward thinking. Problem was, it cost more to run than the whole of the town that Arai was located in put together and hardly anyone walked over it. Excellent management decisions. Indeed the staff walked under it, in their elaborate tunnels.

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  • SnowJapan Admin

I remember when I went and had a tour of the place with Blair and some of the managers. Some of the 'tunnels' I walked through were very wide. I'm not sure if vehicles went through there but they were certainly big enough. They certainly splashed out on the place. It's a shame that more people didn't go and experience it but the numbers just weren't there. The snow was fantastic the few times I went, some of the best I have experienced in Japan.

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The "plaza" was a massive heated courtyard the hotels were built around. If they had massive tunnels as well, it sounds like they could have set up a ground source heat pump and slashed their heating cost using geothermal. That's assuming you should be heating the ground in the first place, of course.

 

I read once in Japanese that they never walked the hill before the resort was planned out. They just flew over it in helicopters when it was still all forested I guess.

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It sounds though that if the correct management got in there they could make a go of it...no? Everyone on here tends to talk about it in mythical proportions and I would've loved the chance to give it a go. Couldn't they just NOT heat the courtyard and clear it by other normal means? Thus saving a fortune in heating costs? Obviously I appreciate that there were more problems than just turning the heating on or off and if the numbers just weren't there then they were there. I think people often said that there are far too many small crappy resorts out there that really should just die off but aren't and so strangling the ones that are potentially viable like this one. Seems a shame as like I said everyone seemed to have a good word to say about the place as far as the ridng went.

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But people just didn't go TB. Even if some people seemed to love it.

 

Perhaps not in the best location? Going for the wrong market? Though I actually don't think it's that much of a difference from Myoko just down the road. And the Shink will help perhaps when that opens with a station in Joetsu.

 

Like most things there's probably a ton of things we can't even guess about that's involved making it very difficult to start up again.

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Yeah, like I said if the numbers just weren't there....I actually know almost nothing about ths resort, just what people have talked about on here. So it does seem a shame that its closed. Did you ever go GG? What was it like?

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I liked the snow, and there was tons of it. It wasn't the biggest resort over long and thin. Probably one of the coldest I've been.

 

Down at the base it just reeked of bubbly-type overspend. That heated plaza was just funny... hardly anyone there and they are spending all that money on heating it up. There were even places to walk that were covered so you didn't need to be on the plaza. It was just too extravagent.

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