The Stash: Surprising behavior of skiers who leave the state during low-snow years.

A few weeks ago we looked at an intriguing, interesting group within the mountain resort industry: skiers who leave the state during low snow years. We found that, sure enough, the volume of these travelers spiked during Tahoe’s recent stretch of warm, dry winters, but how else did their behavior vary from normal years?

The Goods
To find our answer we used the same sample of rocky mountain resorts as the previous analysis, but instead of looking solely at volume compared to the average, we started by looking at lead time (booking window). Plotted below are the average lead times of all guests compared to guests from California during the last five winter seasons.

During the first few years of this sample, the difference between all skiers’ lead times and Californian’s was about 5.3 days. During last season, that difference was about 4.4 days. Looking at length of stay:

Even though LOS grew each year, it grew for both segments with a difference of just 0.04 nights between the two last season after an average difference of 0.07 nights for the first four years.

What This Means
We fully expected to see some difference in these behaviors. Maybe Californians wouldn’t plan until later once they saw the weather, maybe they’d stay longer to make up for lost days locally – but nothing happened.

The Californians that traveled to the rockies to ski last season behaved just like they did in other years relative to the greater skiing population. The only difference was there happened to be more of them.

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