Q: Did affluent destination guests change their habits during a low snow year?

It’s hard to be optimistic about a season with so little snow for so many resorts, but there are plenty of lessons to learn about skier behaviors. Today, we’ll look at habits of the most wealthy destination skiers. We’ll define them as guests with household income over $250,000 who booked lodging during the season.

Theories
We weren’t quite sure what to expect from this analysis. On the one hand, perhaps wealthy skiers would be less concerned about getting their money’s worth from a trip to the mountains. On the other hand, they might expect a high level of service and a superior skiing product because they are spending more than your typical skier.

So, would they not worry about spending money on bad skiing or would they expect better and simply take their vacation dollars elsewhere? Here’s what we found.

The Goods
We looked at six of our ski resort clients that append wealth data to guests. In the chart below, blue represents what percentage of total visitors were wealthy in 2010/2011. Red represents that same metric for 2011/2012.

Across the board, the percentage of wealthy travelers dropped from 10/11 to 11/12 by an average of 4.1 percentage points and 37% overall. How did total numbers pan out?

Again, consistent drops for each resort. Overall, wealthy guests fell by 43% while guests below the $250k HHI level fell by only 7%.

What Does This Mean?
Maybe wealthy skiers aren’t what we’d call “die-hards”, maybe they have many options to choose from and, when the snow doesn’t fly, they simply go to the next best option. Either way, it suggests a change in strategy when Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate. Focusing extra attention on the wealthy might be what it takes to get big-spenders to your mountain. Or, perhaps dollars should be focused on other demographics instead if that turns out to be a lost cause.

Hopefully every resort will break positive snowfall records for the next decade. But if not, these lessons from dry winters could come in handy. If you have any guest-behavior questions about last season, let us know. We’ll do out best to find an answer in a future Stash.

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