A story from The Economist about ski resorts caught my eye (okay, I am a bit behind in my reading – the story was from the double issue in December). The article said that the economy has hit ski resorts in the Rockies hard as consumers look for options closer to home to avoid costly airfares. I looked at Hitwise Internet search data to see if our data is showing any interesting patterns in how people are searching for ski resorts.
I created a Hitwise Search Term Portfolio with about fifty of the most popular ski resorts in the US and Canada. We are still a couple of weeks off the peak period for ski related searches but so far things aren’t looking half bad. The share of US Internet for the portfolio of ski resorts that I created is up 22% year over year.
The following table shows the top 10 most searched for ski areas in the twelve weeks to January 24th, 2009 compared to the same period in 2008. The big difference year over year are the gains posted by Mount High, Snow Summit and Mammoth Mountain – all relatively close to LA. These top three ski areas gathered a much larger share of searches compared with last year. All were in the top 10 last year but this year each more than doubled their share of ski resort searches. It’s these top ranked ski areas that are pulling up the category.

By contrast, searches for “lake tahoe” moved from a ranking of 1st to 4th, “breckenridge” from 4 to 9, “heavenly ski resort” (in Tahoe) from 6 to 32 and “kirkwood” from 9 to 23. While LA area hills seem to be fairing well, those in Northern California and in the Rockies seem to be hit hardest. Are you planning a ski trip this year? Has the economic situation changed your plans?