Q: How many of your lost beginner skiers actually ended up at other mountains?

Last week we focused on a common question our ski clients face and analyzed how many beginner skiers are retained by the resort that teaches them. And, even more, how much these retained skiers spend. But what about those who don’t return and aren’t retained? Do they show up at other mountains? That was our next question. Here’s the answer.

The Goods
For this analysis we started with the same group of 40,000 beginner lesson-takers as last week. We rarely show more than one chart in a Stash post, but we’ll do so quickly to illustrate how we approached this next step. At each season, we only looked at the group that wasn’t retained (aka, the original group minus the group indicated in orange below).

Within that group we then looked across 75 other North American ski resorts that represent just under half of all skier visits to find two things: first, how many of this group showed up during that same season at other mountains and, second, how much they spent during that season. The teal bars below represent what percentage of the non-retained group showed up at other mountains.

Notice that we kept the same scale on this chart as the original. For this sample, about 6.9% of the non-retained group showed up at other mountains spending an average of $384 during 2011/12. By 2012/13, the rate had dropped slightly to 6.1% while spend had climbed to $596/skier.

What This Means
For just this sample, for every 2 beginners who come back to a resort, about 1 showed up at another mountain. Keep in mind, however, that this sample only represents half of skier visits. If we could see every ski area, there’s a good chance that ratio would approach 1:1. And while they don’t seem to spend as much that first year, within a few seasons spend has nearly caught up to retained skiers. What surprised us most was that, on average, these beginners showed up across 26 different mountains (35% of mountains in our sample) in each season we looked at.

We hope these simple analyses spark ideas for your team and paint a better picture about how resorts share the value of each beginner skier they create. We’ll be back with more crossover and beginner insights soon (and, to our clients, contact your account manager with specific ideas and analyses), but in the meantime let us know if you have new questions come up.

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