Q: Who gets the biggest discount on lift tickets because of age: seniors or juniors?

Discounts are often a reward for action. Things like buying early, skiing midweek, visiting during shoulder seasons all involve factors a customer can control. But then there’s age. For years, resorts have rewarded both the old and young with savings on their products. But who are resorts giving the bigger discount to? Young whippersnappers or old-timers? And when do these rewards start?

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at lift ticket rates from 75 North American mountain resorts. With myriad tiers for ages, we started with a universal group – adults – and then found the shoulder groups just above and below adults. This ends up telling us what kids pay just before reaching adult status and what seniors pay right as they leave it.

Intrigued by when these points occured, we found the average points at which a youth/child/teen becomes an adult and when an adult becomes a senior. Take a look.

To be more specific, the last year of discounts for children was about 16 years of age. The most common age was 12 with 18 not far behind. Adults became seniors at an average of 65 which was also the age used by over 2/3 of resorts in the sample. In terms of discount, it was almost exactly identical. Seniors saw a discount of 24.7% with the younger crowd at 24.6%.

What This Means
As we looked closer, two interesting trends stood out. First, almost exactly half of the 75 resorts we looked at used the same pricing for both groups. In fact, many would often group them in their marketing. In that sense, the fact that the discounts are so close isn’t surprising.

But what is surprising is how virtually no, clear trend emerged from the other half of the group. Some gave juniors massive discounts and others asked them to pay nearly the same price as adults. Some gave seniors free (or nearly free) skiing and others offered no discount at all. But in the end both strategies almost perfectly canceled each other out giving skiers, on average, the same discount as they both enter and leave adulthood.

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