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Ski Resorts Battle Aging Demographic

By Steve Casimiro on January 18th, 2013

JayClimate change isn’t the biggest challenge facing ski resorts — it’s that skiers are OLD. Attracting new skiers isn’t easy and neither is retaining them: Resorts like Vermont’s Jay Peak say that college skiers often drop out of skiing as they start their careers. Even worse, children aren’t learning at the same rate of 20 years ago. Jay is battling the trend (which could see a drop-off of 40 million annual skier visits by 2025) by reaching out to entire families, not just with packages, but with a massive, $2.5-million skier education program. The company’s CEO, Bill Stenger, says focusing on recruiting and keeping new skiers is long overdue: “I honestly think our industry has gotten a little bit lazy. We need to be more aggressive and more deliberate in how we introduce kids, in the proper way, so they get passionate about it.” Via WPTZ.com.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2013 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Ski Resorts Battle Aging Demographic”

  1. Ben January 18th, 2013 at 4:04 pm

    I think the prices of the resorts has A LOT to do with. Many younger people do not wish to spend $80+ on a lift ticket or deal with the faux villages that seem to be quickly becoming the standard. What happened to ski areas? You know the places people went to and actually skied.

  2. Nick January 18th, 2013 at 5:54 pm

    If they want to hold on to the graduating college kids, more mountains need to embrace the “20′s pass” like Sugarbush ($300) and Okemo ($600).

  3. Asa January 18th, 2013 at 7:20 pm

    It’s definitely the prices. And the seemingly endless string of poor winters, or at least the inconsistent winters. Speaking for NE, two winters ago was great (but only Jan/Feb/Mar), but last winter terrible and so far, this winter is looking to be bad too. Who wants to spend $80+ to ski on a bunch of wind-swept ice or man-made crusty snow?

  4. Josh January 18th, 2013 at 8:28 pm

    Jay needs to wisen up. Fix the dang mountain before building a whole new “village”. Like modenize allllllllll of the lifts and snowmaking system and ski school. gotta say the waterpark is cool though. New hotels wont work, Its a local kinda mountain. Price of tickets and gear is un-affordable for new time skiiers in this 2013 society. People with money THINK HARDER!

  5. Rob January 19th, 2013 at 12:10 am

    Yay!! More first tracks for me!

  6. Rob S. January 20th, 2013 at 5:02 pm

    Agree about prices, however what I really want is culture- food trucks, concerts, cheap/cool places to stay, races, arts festivals, films, etc. $100 is a lot for a lift ticket (in Tahoe now), but spend that much on a weekend of snowshoeing that included the crap listed above. I don’t personally feel this is inconsistent with ‘Mountain Culture’, just the late 90′s condo-fest that took over our national forests. Just to restate one point- lift tix are pricey, but if people had cheap places to stay, that might help (Airbnb is my solution) also, Tahoe would benefit from about 100,000 less people up here (I’m from Oakland, so I really have no claim on the mountains- then again, no one does) ok rant/ramble over