Q: Male passholders ski more, but are they more likely to renew next season?

Last week we looked at whether male season passholders skied more than female passholders. They did, but with renewal rates tied to ski days we took this a step further and looked at renewal rates by gender as well. So, are male passholders more likely to renew?

The Goods
To find our answer we used the same sample as last week – 1,000,000 passholder/season combinations across 10 resorts – drawing in each skier’s seasonal count of days spent on the mountain. We found the average renewal rate for each group and plotted it on the chart below.

The average renewal rate for men in our sample was 60.5% and 58.4% for women – a difference of 1.1% or 2.1 percentage points.

What This Means
So why was there only a 1.1% difference in renewal rates (60.5% vs 58.4%) when there was a 28% difference in average days skied (8.8 vs 6.8)? To answer that we have to remember where that gap of 2 days came from. As we learned last week, the source was the long tail were men show up with much higher frequency.

But also remember that renewal rates are mostly flat after 15 days. So if the frequency of men and women is identical at day counts where both skier volume is highest and renewal rate changes the most (6-10 days), and long tail skiers have the same effect on average renewal rates as someone with 1/10 as many days, the gap may not disappear altogether, but it will be much smaller as we saw here.

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