Completely against my nature or will, I feel obligated to poke fun at P90X from time to time. Not because the program isn’t awesome, but rather because of the 50+ people I’ve known who started it, not one has finished.

If you’ve succeeded? Congrats, you’re a rare minority. Instead, P90Xers usually only last a few weeks before mental excuses creep in and the DVDs gather dust on the shelf. Heck, I even named the header image of this post P30X.

But what about skiers? We’re different, right? RIGHT?

Season Resolutions?
Many resorts ask a simple, “how many days do you plan on skiing this year” question in their surveys. While it’s not a question specifically about goals, it certainly gets at a similar number whether the goal was officially made or not.

In the Stash this week, I took the responses to these questions and crossed them against how many days they actually skied (well, days their pass was scanned, so some slight room for error). Here’s what I found:

Nearly 80% of skiers overestimated how many days they would ski that year by a margin of over 45%. They averaged a guess of 15 days on the snow, but averaged a tally of only 8. Just like those workout videos, their skis were gathering dust more than they were shredding lines.

Preventative Maintenance
Years ago, I learned a valuable lesson. If something cooking in the oven spills over, you can either spend 15 seconds to clean it up now or 15 minutes to clean it up later.

I think this is often happening with season pass sales because, if they ski 8 days instead of 15, the likelihood they’ll renew goes from 75%-80% to below 50%. Like dripping cheese from a pizza, we’re letting a massive reason that people don’t renew to bake onto the over floor all season long. Then, after it’s too late to quickly solve the problem, we work like crazy to get them to renew.

The best part is that these skiers already want to ski that much and you’re not selling them anything except getting more bang for their buck and helping them achieve a goal. Getting season pass holders to ski more may be the easiest marketing we can do, but it’s one of the rarest campaigns I come across.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.