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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Top Ski destinations

January 18, 2008

There were worries that recent storms in Scotland might cause the snow to melt too quickly for the country to have a viable ski season this year. However, looking at Hitwise data this doesn’t seem to have deterred ski enthusiasts at all. Searches for “ski scotland” have doubled compared to the same week last year, and searches for “skiing in scotland” are up 50%.

So what are the most popular ski resorts for this year? The table below lists the top 10 most searched for ski resorts over the last four weeks.

Top 10 ski resorts val thorens morzina la plagne whistler chamonix tignes coucheval les arcs gets.png

France is the number one choice with eight of the top ten, although last year’s top resort, Chamonix, took a tumble to number five. Canadian resort Whistler ranks at number four, with searches doubling over the last year. Cairngorm Mountain in Scotland has seen a resurgence of interest, with searches for “cairngorm” not featuring in the top 20 last year.

Consumers looking for skiing holidays are more likely to visit agency websites for information on tailored packages, as opposed to the do-it-yourself approach of visiting airlines, hotels and prices comparison sites favoured for warmer destinations. Specialist ski holiday operators pick up a large amount of ski-related traffic, with one third of searches for “ski holidays” shared between two specialist websites, Direct Ski and Crystal Ski.

“Ski holidays” is the most popular ski-related search term, but it is also quite generic and therefore hard to optimize for / expensive to buy as a search term. In the data we see that there were 3.5x the breadth of search terms containing the word “ski” than there were containing “skiing”, with users looking for, amongst other things, “cheap ski holidays”, “ski deals”, and “ski wear”.

UK internet searches for ski and skiing.png

I took a look at our Mosaic Lifestyle data to see who is visiting the Snow Sports category, and wasn’t too surprised to see the most affluent group, Group A - Symbols of Success, accounted for almost one in five visits to the category. The top 3 most affluent lifestyle groups in the United Kingdom make up half of all visits to ski websites. A little more surprising was the representation relative the online population of the different groups in the category. Again, seeing Group A and Group E (Urban Intelligence: young, single and mostly well-educated, with cosmopolitan tastes and liberal attitudes) was not surprising, but look at the right hand of the chart below.

representation of mosaic groups in the snow sports category january 2008.png

Group K, Rural Isolation, are described as people living in rural areas where country life has not been influenced by urban consumption patterns. All of the types within this group are over-represented in the Snow Sports category, which may not actually be as surprising as it seems at first. These people are often ‘incomers’ to rural areas: wealthy new retirees and couples with children at university. Group J is ‘Grey Perspectives’, and within this group there are certain types that are particularly interested in Snow Sports websites: Childfree Serenity, High Spending Elders and Tourist Attendants.

The first two groups are self-explanatory, while the latter group live primarily in UK seaside tourist towns. As they’re stuck at home during the summer months serving tourists, it makes sense that they would take a break themselves during the winter season. Tourist Attendants are also the most over-indexed Mosaic type for our Cruises category.

Where do mosaic group tourist attendents live represented on a map of the uk.png