Snowboarders Make Up Widely Varying Portion of Resort Customers

While snowboarders represent 25 to 35 percent of all visitors to ski areas, their numbers vary from region and even resort to resort. The gold standard for these numbers is the Kottke National End of Season Survey, a product of the National Ski Areas Association. It’s a thorough product, but it costs $200 for nonmembers, so I haven’t seen a copy of it in years.

The other day I was looking at my stats on Trace. It’s a phone-based app that tracks your vertical distance, miles traveled, and so forth, but there’s also a web-based version that lets you look at resorts across the world. From it, you can get an overview of the people who use Trace at a particular resort. Vertical distance. Top speed. Average speed. That sort of stuff. And, surprisingly, the percentage of users who are on skis or on a snowboard.

And when you look at lots of different resorts, you see that snowboarding is more popular at some resorts than at others. At Mt. Crescent, Iowa, 92 percent (as of this date) of Trace users are on snowboards. On the other end of the scale, only 9 percent of the Trace users at Wild Mountain, Minnesota, are snowboarding.

I constructed a list of 110 resorts from across North America. Some are there because they are the most popular on the continent, others are there to represent various places where resorts can be found. So the list may have some biases in what’s included and what’s not, but it does capture much of what’s going on in the industry.

There are two other notes that may limit the validity of this data. One is that the people who use Trace may not necessarily be a representative sample of the skiing/riding public. That is, the people who use Trace may be more likely (or less likely) to be skiers (or riders) than the overall snow-sliding public. Another limitation is that the phones on which Trace runs can’t detect whether a person is on a board or on a set of skis. It’s up to the user to set that information, and what the person does may change from visit to visit. So someone who sets up his profile as a skier may sometimes be on a snowboard, someone who sets up her profile as a snowboarder may sometimes be on skis.

With those caveats in place, it’s time to roll out the numbers. They’re arranged, loosely, by geographic region. At the average resort in New England, less than 25 percent of Trace users were snowboarders, but the number in the western U.S. and Canada is over 40 percent. The percentages for the eastern U.S. and Canada and the U.S. Midwest are in between.