Trends Q: Do families stay longer at resorts in the summer as well as the winter?

Families are an important bunch to resorts and the travel industry. We’ve looked at this group in a few different ways before, but today wanted to answer a straightforward question: how does seasonality impact the LOS of families versus non-families? A simple query, here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we took a sample of over 500,000 reservations made during the last two years at mountain resorts across the country. We then found the average LOS for both families and non families from both winter and summer reservations so we could compare the two. Here’s how it looks:

Keep in mind the graph is scaled to only show the range from 2.0-3.0, but looking at this level makes it fairly clear that the gap between families and non families is greater in the winter (difference of 0.3) than in summer (difference of 0.1) for our sample.

What This Means
In winter, nearly every resort we analyzed showed a longer LOS for families. In summer, however, the narrow margin should be telling because nearly half the resorts in the sample showed an equal or higher LOS for non-families.

So, while families do tend to stay longer and, thus, might require a different message or offer than their childless counterparts during winter months, that doesn’t appear to be the case (at least for the mountain resorts we looked at) once the snow melts.

The List Grows
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