Laurent Vanat holds a master’s degree in commercial and industrial sciences from the University of Geneva. With more than thirty years of experience in management consulting, he has his own business management consulting company, Laurent Vanat Consulting SARL, of which he is the founder and principal consultant. It specializes in economic and financial expertise in mountain tourism.

Laurent Vanat has become a renowned international expert on the economics of ski resorts. He first acquired his experience in Switzerland, by benchmarking the largest resorts and launching a systematic collection of attendance data in 2004. His work has led since the winter of 2004/05 to the publication of the annual report on the Swiss ski season. In order to compare Swiss ski resorts with their counterparts in the Alps and North America, this report provided a very brief overview of these respective markets.

The increasing demand for international reference data has resulted in the expansion of the scope of the study to more countries. Thus, from 2009, a broader panorama of international ski markets was presented, in a dedicated report. From 7 countries initially covered in the first report in 2009, the number increased to 72 in 2020.

Today, the International Report on Snow and Mountain Tourism is recognized worldwide as the benchmark for ski industry figures. Since 2016, it has been translated several times into Chinese and 2018 exceptionally saw a French version, on the occasion of the 10th edition of the report. The data produced has already been presented at numerous international meetings, including the OITAF congress in Rio de Janeiro, those of the UNWTO in Andorra, Almaty, Tbilisi and Ulsan, ALPITEC / ISPO in Beijing, Mountain Planet in Grenoble and meetings of FIS, BOCOG and many other organizations. He is frequently cited by numerous press articles, reports and other media and serves as a reference in several conferences and television interviews.

Furthermore, the hallmark of its business consulting firm is assistance in the preparation of business plans, based on its own structured methodology, which has proven itself. Laurent Vanat Consulting SARL helps companies present a professional business plan. Whether by supporting the company's management step by step in the process of preparing its business plan or by the simple validation of an already established business plan. This methodology exists in several languages, in a version dedicated to mountain tourism as well as in a more generic version.