Q: Do families book further in advance than other resort guests?

We’ve looked at family behavior a few times, but today wanted to ask a simple question that we haven’t yet addressed by comparing how far in advance families book compared to other resort guests. Do school schedules and other factors impact behavior enough to pay closer attention to? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 2,000,000 reservations from mountain resorts over the last decade. We first grouped them by their lead time in 10-day increments (horizontal axis below) and then found the split between families and non-families for each group (vertical axis). Here’s how it shook out.

Overall, the split between families and non-families changed very little as lead time decreased for this sample. Families made up their biggest percentage of all bookings (48.5%) at about 131-140 days out and their lowest (39.5%) at 21-30 days out.

What This Means
We’re always looking for traits that can be used to increase the relevance of marketing messages or match the message’s timing to a potential behavior. In this case, however, we’re not seeing enough to worry about.

True, there is a noticeable variation and families do tend to book further in advance overall than non-families, but the changes are slight. With limited time and resources, most travel marketers probably shouldn’t do much more than tuck this insight in their back pocket for when the question arises down the road.

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