Q: Does a male season passholder ski more than a female passholder?

Over the years we’ve done a handful of analyses about season passholders at ski resorts. Despite the coverage, there are dozens of queries without answers. For example, do male season passholders ski more each season than female passholders? And, if so, how big is the difference?

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over a million combinations of passholder and season across ten U.S. resorts. We then divided these passholders by their gender and grouped them by their days spent skiing each season. These groups are shown below as a percentage of total passholders. So 60% at 1-5 means 60% of female passholders skied between 1 and 5 days in a season.

From this sample, more women (as a percentage of all female passholders) skied 1-5 days. The rates were nearly the same at 5-10 days, but anything higher leaned decisively toward men all through the long tail. The average days skied by men in our sample was 8.8 versus 6.8 for women. The median days skied for men was 5 and the median days skied for women was 4.

What This Means
Simply put, male passholders ski more than women. More specifically, men are much more likely to put up the big total of 50, 75, or 100+ days on the mountain which is highlighted in the bigger gap between the average than the median. While, on the other hand, a greater percentage of women ski five or fewer days in a season.

But remember the correlation between days skied and renewal rates? If there is a different in days skied, would there also be a difference in renewal rates? As you may have guessed, that’s what we’ll be looking at next week.

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