How many season passholders are from out of state in the West, Midwest, and East?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

More and more resorts are focusing season passholder efforts on their destination guests. As this happens, we were curious to see how many passholders are from the same state as the resort. Recognizing that markets across the country are very different, we also wanted to see how these in-state passholder ratios compared for the West, East, and Midwest. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
As mentioned already, rather than build out a complex analysis of drive radii and metro areas for each resort, we kept it simple and grouped passholders that were from the same state as the resort where they purchased a pass. We looked at over a half-million season pass sales from 23 U.S. resorts across four seasons to find our answer. Here’s how it broke down:

bar chart

The quick answer is that, overall, about 57% of season passholders at U.S. ski resorts are from the same state as the resort we included in this sample. On the flip side, about 43% are from out of state. The West was almost exactly on this average. The East, however, saw a nearly 50/50 split between in-state and out-of-state passholders. The area that brought the overall average back in favor of in-staters was the Midwest were nearly 95% of passholders were from the same state as the resort.

Keep in mind that the charts don’t account for everything. For example, our sample includes more centrally located midwestern resorts, rather than the significant number of areas that pull a large percentage of their guests across borders (such as Perfect North Slopes or the resorts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan).

What This Means
There are likely a few, key factors at play here. In the East, where states are smaller and major metro areas likely fall outside of that state, the numbers favor out-of-staters. In the West, where states are larger and likely encompass their key markets, the chart tilts toward in-state skiers.

The interesting lesson, however, is the Midwest, where even though states are closer in size to the West, skiing might be viewed more as a commodity. If you’re going to hold a season pass at all, perhaps the logic is that it might as well be the resort down the road because the perceived variations in size and quality between ski areas may be much smaller between different states.