Resort hotels may sound like an unusual investment in today’s fast-paced, technology-driven, buzzword-laden market, but Skytop Lodge International (Pink Sheets: SKTPP), the operating company of Skytop Lodge Resort in the Pocono Mountains of Philadelphia, has been an investor favorite since 1928.According to the company’s Web site, the resort sprawls over 5,500 acres of magnificent mountain estate and encompasses an entire lake, a golf course, and a skiing area. At the center of the estate is the resort itself, a historic Dutch Colonial stone manor that can provide luxury accommodations for up to 125 guests a night.
In a brief interview, Robert Baldarassi, Skytop’s director of sales and marketing, painted a very fair picture of the resort’s amazing facilities.
“We offer a year-round array of activities; all our amenities are right on-site,” Baldarassi told MN1. “During the ski season, we have our own ski slope, we have both downhill and cross-country ski trails, tobogganing – [in fact,] we have one of the remaining toboggan runs in the North-East as far as I can find- and we also offer sledding, ice skating, snowshoeing, and ice-fishing. In the summer, we have award-winning golf – golf digest rates our course 4.5 out of 5 stars – and we have a wonderful sporting clays and trap-skeet-shooting range.
“In our 5500-acre estate, only about 300 of those acres are developed,” Baldarassi continued. “There’s 1500 acres of pristine woodlands, and we’ve got 30 miles of hiking trails, numerous scenic vistas, two sets of waterfalls, so in order to manage that end of our business we have our resident naturalist on-staff, and that naturalist provides nature hikes and nature presentations for our guests.”
All of this is done to give the resort the healthy, family-oriented feeling it’s had since it was begun in the late 20s. In fact, that family-oriented feeling extends to the company’s investors, who are often relatives or descendants of the company’s original investors.
“We’ve always been a publicly traded company, although the shares are held very close,” Baldarassi said. “Some of the families that own our stock are the families of the original investors that really got behind the project in the early 20s. It’s held close to the vest – the people that own the stock have an emotional connection to the stock, maybe their grandfather owned it, their grandfather took them [to the resort] as a child, so they have those fond memories and they continue now to perpetuate that memory down to the next generation.”
Naturally, Skytop is looking to expand itself after all this time, eager to attract new investors and new business. To keep things moving during the week, the company has built an executive conference center for corporate seminars, corporate retreats, and business meetings. In addition, the company has revamped all its interior furnishings and is considering building a brand-new spa and indoor sports facility.
“We’ve been hosting generations of the family for years, our repeat business is about 67 percent, and we’re trying to find new guests,” Baldarassi said. “If we can [provide these great services] for some, we can probably do it for all.”