Ready, Set, Snow: Vacasa Issues First Ski & Winter Search Report

The leading vacation rental management platform reveals this season’s top travel takeaways, based on booking and search data for mountain destinations

According to the 2021 Holiday Forecast and Winter Travel Trends survey from Vacasa (NASDAQ: VCSA), North America’s leading vacation rental management platform, 63% of Americans planned to take a trip in 2022 and 82% of those travelers planned to travel more often than last year. So, as the first month of the new year comes to a close, Vacasa dug into the latest booking trends to see how people are plotting out their snow-season getaways and how it stacks (or, rather, snow packs) up to last year.

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A ski market Vacasa vacation rental (Photo: Business Wire)

Released today, Vacasa’s 2022 Ski & Winter Search Report* plows through months of Vacasa data, including millions of site visits and thousands of vacation home reservations in 15 popular U.S. ski markets—from California to Vermont—as well as Canada and a few snowbird escapes, too.

From the must-have amenities for wintry escapes to how the season impacts length of stay, here are five of the report’s top takeaways—plus a tip on when to search for ski trips to get ahead of the curve:

• Ski trip searching starts in fall: Though search engine traffic to Vacasa’s ski-in/ski-out vacation rentals page started climbing high in October 2021, the page saw its highest organic traffic of the year in December.
• As nights get longer, so do trips: Guests are bundling up and settling in for winter stays—this year, 56% of winter reservations in Vacasa’s ski markets are for 4-7 nights compared to just 27% of 2021 summer reservations for that same length.
• Choosing condos over cabins: Vacation rental condos, which are more likely to have ski-in/ski-out perks, emerged as the accommodation of choice across the ski markets.
• Amenities for convenience—and coziness: It’s no surprise that “ski-in/ski-out” ranked as the most-searched amenity in ski markets, followed by “hot tub” at #2, but surprised to see “washer and dryer” at number three on the list? Packing several sets of ski clothes can be bulky, after all.
• Heading south for the winter: A number of warm-weather destinations are seeing big jumps in occupancy this season, too, as travelers seek to return to the sunny beaches of Hawaii and the magic of Disney World.

“Summer has become synonymous with vacation, but winter getaways and ski trips in particular are a time-honored tradition that travelers look forward to each year. Using Vacasa data, we were able to look at not only how and when people are planning these vacations, but also the features and snowy—or snowbird—destinations they’re prioritizing,” said Caleb Donegan, VP of Marketing at Vacasa. “Our findings show that the change in seasons does influence travel behavior and vacation rental preferences, and both shifts have been especially visible within the broader context of the pandemic.”

Vacasa’s full 2022 Ski & Winter Search Report is available here.

*Methodology Note: For this report, the winter/ski season is defined as December 1, 2021, through February 28, 2022, and the summer season is defined as June 1, 2021, through August 31, 2021. Booking data reflects all Vacasa reservations from these time periods. Percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

The term “ski markets” used throughout this report encompasses data from the following markets: High Sierras and Lake Tahoe, CA; Aspen/Snowmass, Front Range, Steamboat Springs, Summit County, Vail/Beaver Creek, and Winter Park, CO; McCall, Panhandle, and Sun Valley/Ketchum, ID; Northern Montana; Mt. Hood, OR; Okemo, VT; Wyoming; and British Columbia and Ontario, Canada.

About Vacasa

Vacasa is the leading vacation rental management platform in North America, transforming the vacation rental experience by integrating purpose-built technology with expert local and national teams. Homeowners enjoy earning significant incremental income on one of their most valuable assets, delivered by the company’s unmatched technology that adjusts rates in real time to maximize revenue. Guests can relax comfortably in Vacasa’s 35,000+ homes across more than 400 destinations in North America, Belize and Costa Rica, knowing that 24/7 support is just a phone call away. In addition to enabling guests to search, discover and book its properties on Vacasa.com and the Vacasa Guest App, Vacasa provides valuable, professionally managed inventory to top channel partners, including Airbnb, Booking.com and Vrbo.

For more information, visit https://www.vacasa.com/press.

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