Skiers and snowboarders are increasingly hitting the Web before they hit the slopes.
Skiers spend about 14 hours per week on the Internet; snowboarders, generally a younger group, 17 hours per week, says Alicia Allen, consumer marketing manager for SnowSports Industries America. That compares with four hours per week for the average Web surfer, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
Last year, 7.4 million Americans spent at least one day skiing, and 5.6 million spent a day snowboarding, Allen says.
Any way you add it up, that’s a lot of hours on the Internet. Marketers of ski products have created a plethora of resources for this connected audience.
“Sixty-five percent of our visitors say they book travel online, research destinations, resorts and gear, check weather reports and snow conditions, and validate those conditions with our mountain cams,” says Doug Sabanosh, associate editor of Mountain Sports Interactive, the publisher of Skimag.com and Skiingmag.com. Each site had about 800,000 unique visitors in 2002.
Rather than relying on a generic search engine such as Google, skiers looking for a central location for links to snow sport Web pages might start at www.skicentral.com. It has grown from a small index of several hundred sites in the fall of 1995 to a compendium of more than 8,000 sites. The home page is broken into eight main categories such as resorts, travel and lodging, to help refine searches. Nearly 2 million snow- sport enthusiasts visited the site last season, making it among the most visited snow-sport sites on the Web.
What such enthusiasts are doing on the Web depends on the month or time of season. Visitors spend as much as 35 percent of their time researching gear, especially in the fall leading up to Christmas, Sabanosh says.
“As we get more into the ski season, we’ve found that the travel and snow reports sections account for 20 to 30 percent of the pages viewed,” he says. Though millions are hitting the slopes every year, growth in their numbers has been stagnant.
To help remedy that, last month SIA launched www.snowlinkjr.com, aimed at kids 4 to 12.
“Kids are where the future of the sport is, and we want to get them young so they become a lifetime participant,” Allen says. Skiing can be expensive entertainment. A three-day pass at Vail, Colo., for instance, purchased 14 days in advance, is $201, or $67 a day; it’s $219, or $73 a day, purchased at the window.
“That’s a hurdle that we’re going to continue to face to get first-time people out on the slopes,” Allen says. Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz all have ski package deals, some of which include passes rolled into the package.
Peek at the peaks
If you have already made your ski travel plans and just want to check on snow conditions, many resorts now have Web cameras that give you a view. Doug Sabanosh of Skimag.com recommends www.rsn.com. There you will find Web cams for many major ski resorts around the U.S., as well as cams for land- and water-sport enthusiasts.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Joe Knowles (jknowles@tribune.com)
