Q: Did more skiers cancel their ski vacations because of a low-snow year?

The Stash rolls on this week with another analysis of guest behavior during 2011-2012. This time around, we’re going to look at cancellations. Did Mother Nature’s habit of avoiding the mountains inspire resort guests to follow suit? Here’s what we found.

The Setup
We looked at data from 23 resorts for 2009/10, 2010/11, and 2011/12. Our initial reaction was that these numbers were much higher than expected. Keep in mind we didn’t break this out so it includes all segments and all cancellations. The important thing, more than total numbers, is to watch the trend and then look at your own numbers and compare. Here’s what we found.

The Goods
In 2009/10, the resorts we looked at averaged a cancellation rate of 18.53%. In 2010/11, that number stayed almost identical at 18.51%. However, in 2011/12, these resorts saw cancellation rates edge up to 20.98% – 1.5 percentage points higher and an increase of 13.2% overall.

What about the individual resorts? The biggest jumps in cancellation rates came from Western resorts in states like Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California as well as the East. However, where the snow was falling in states like Washington, Idaho, and Montana, resorts saw little or no change in cancellation rates.

What This Means
It’s clear that less-than-ideal conditions will cause some people to cancel. In the future, a proactive approach to cancellations by identifying traits of people that frequently cancel and hitting those groups with carefully planned messaging could help. Providing extra incentives to carry through with their plan by discounting or highlighting off-mountain experiences might curb this number as well. Maybe it will take something more.

As we’ve said before, hopefully we won’t have to worry about something like this for another decade…or two. However, knowing it happened means we can address it as the situation returns instead of looking back at the season and wishing we could have done something about it.

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