A chilling article in the Wall Street Journal last spring noted that women were dropping out of skiing at a worrisome rate—down from 44 percent to 38 percent overall. Jim Spring’s Leisure Trends Group reported a similar decline, down from more than 46 percent in the 1992-93 season to 41.2 percent in 1994-95. The recent survey of Canadian ski markets reported in September SAM confirmed that women abandon skiing at a significantly greater rate than men.
Women, married or single, are increasingly independent, financially and socially and, thanks to affirmative action in school sports, younger women are more comfortable enjoying physical activity than the generations that came of age in the 60s and 70s. They can afford to ski and are more confident that they can do it. The number of women-only ski programs is growing.
So why the slump in women’s participation in skiing?
Some of the obstacles can be lumped under the title, “hassle factor,” but much of the decline in numbers can be attributed to poor promotion of the benefits and services that skiing provides women. While a third factor is a male-dominated sport sending male messages that don’t get a positive response from females.
Hassles and Fatigue
It’s never been easy for mom or dad to wrangle skis, boots, poles, long johns and Doctor Dentons for a family of four (or five or six) from a two-story Tudor in the suburbs 2,000 miles away to a snow-covered Alpine lodge in the Rockies. But it used to be less intimidating when mom was at home, able to chase missing mittens, throw a load of socks into the washing machine and run to the ski shop to pick up the newly tuned skis.
Women of the 90s are not at home any more.
Today most women (68 percent) work outside the home full or part-time, contributing at least half or more of the family income, according to a 1995 survey from Louis Harris and Associates sponsored by the Whirlpool Foundation.
Moreover, although parental roles are shifting somewhat, women still bear primary responsibility for raising the children and, with or without offspring, keeping the household running smoothly.
Ponteir Sackrey, public relations manager at Jackson Hole, Wyo., puts it more graphically: “A lot of my friends who work and have small children have dropped out of skiing. They’re just fried—fried!—on Friday night—they can’t run around getting everything together for a skiing weekend. They just want to hang out at home.”
Promotable Services
Actually ski areas do provide many of the services that are high on a working mother’s ski vacation list. The problem is they are not promoting them adequately or targeting them specifically enough to women.
Child care. According to the Harris report, time with their families is a priority for working women. But families don’t have to be joined at the hip 24 hours a day to call it a family vacation. Separate programs for children count heavily with mothers who ski: top-notch, licensed nurseries and outstanding ski schools that will provide youngsters from toddlers to teens with a safe and rewarding ski experience.
“The ski industry is already way ahead in terms of facilities that make family ski vacations easy,” says Dorothy Jordon, editor of the newsletter Family Travel Times. “Child-care facilities at ski areas have gotten better and better.”
There’s room for improvement, of course. Day nursery and ski school schedules are often geared for the convenience of the ski area employees and not for the skier and her family. Small children often spend too much time indoors and have energy to spare at the end of the day when parents and siblings are tired from skiing.
Transportation. Janet Spangler, who runs Women’s Ski Experience ski weeks at several Eastern areas, notes the obvious: “Ski area transportation can be traumatic, and that includes the process of getting to the area as well as getting around at the area.” Dumped at a strange airport, often late at night, women don’t want to wrestle with car rentals when it’s all they can do to keep track of the five bags and four children—or was it four bags and five children? Waiting shuttle buses or vans with drivers who offer a friendly welcome and load the luggage give ski areas a good name.
Ski-in, ski-out accommodations. Why? So every member of the family can be independent and no one is stuck waiting for the family car to load up at the end of the day to drive back to the lodge or condo. If Dad wants to quit early and watch the football game or the pre-teen wants to switch from skis to snowboard or the junior racer loses a pair of gloves—again—it doesn’t hold up the rest of the family.
Service. Friendly and helpful service is imperative from the first phone call requesting a brochure to the concierge who gets the messages and the dinner reservations right and the lift operator who cheerfully—not condescendingly—slows the lift for a mother and her six-year-old. “Mothers are career women now and they’re used to things being expertly run,” says Kim Reichshelm of Women’s Ski Adventures. Their standards are high.
For instance, of the ski areas Snow Country Magazine ranked tops last September, the favorites among women are Deer Valley, Sun Valley, Aspen, Snowmass and Vail. The pamper quotient is high at all these areas—as is convenience, including lodging adjacent to the slopes or reliable shuttle buses and a variety of non-skiing activities.
None of those areas is cheap, but time is more important than money with women in the demographic groups that are likely to ski, according to the Harris survey.
Jackson Hole is trying to relieve the time pressure by providing a “seamless,” one-call-does-it-all package that includes not only lodging, lifts, child care, rental equipment and airport transportation, but dinner reservations and bookings for non-ski activities like snowmobiling. The snowmobile guide shows up at the lodge on the appointed day with gloves, helmets—and of course, snowmobiles-for the whole family.
If they really want women to come back to skiing, destination resorts should have little trouble organizing efficient transportation, training service people to smile and even putting together a no-hassle vacation package, if they haven’t done so already. Many resorts have been refining these services for years. Now they need to be promoted.
Male Messages
One question is fundamental: Do ski areas really want women?
At best, the answer to that question is garbled. As both the Wall Street Journal and Brad Edmondson have pointed out, skiing is still a sport set within a male framework and measured by male standards. Perhaps no other individual sport except motorcycling celebrates testosterone thrills as much as downhill skiing.
For many women, that defining image of a skier flying off a cornice is not appealing. Moreover, women’s eyes may glaze over when conversation turns to the fine points of skis, boots and bindings—though most women know that, despite years of prodding, most equipment for women still has a long way to go.
Even more subtle factors may make women cool towards skiing. Edmondson, in urging ski areas to rev up their marketing to women, said, “Keeping women on the slopes is a big enough concern. But it becomes much more important when you consider that women are the gatekeepers to children.”
As an opening line in the campaign to seduce women back to the slopes, that falls somewhere between “What’s your sign?” and “Do you wear orthotics?” No woman wants to be wanted for her children, however much she adores them.
It’s no wonder women interested in the outdoors are turning to climbing, diving, hiking and cross-country skiing, a sport where women do out number men.
Catering to their Concerns
What’s a ski area marketer to do to woo women—and their families—back to the mountains?
First, fund some hard research with women skiers, including the dropouts, about what turned them off and what will commit them to the sport. There are plenty of theories in the air, but as Leisure Trends’ Joy Spring notes, it’s still guesswork.
What we do know—as confirmed by the Harris survey—is that women are more invested in quality than quantity, they like learning and they give high priority to supporting others.
How does that translate to skiing? Show women that you really care by catering to their concerns. Consider:
- A flexible lift ticket, with the option of two or three hours of soul-satisfying runs as opposed to all day racking up vertical feet. Quality, not quantity.
- Ski school classes with the emphasis on experience, not achievement. Stop and smell the pine trees, check out the animal habitats, even play games—all techniques that successful women’s ski programs incorporate in their lessons. Cooperation, not competition.
- Consider making child care a loss leader, suggests Joy Spring. However independent and adventurous a woman may be, studies confirm that her children are still priority one. Affordable quality child care shows that the ski area cares.
- Put some pampering in the package: a facial, a spa afternoon, a sleigh ride combined with high tea in front of a roaring fire.
Check out National Women’s Ski Week, January 15-21, to be celebrated simultaneously at Mammoth Mountain, Stowe and Winter Park. The organizers may know something the rest of us don’t about what women want.
