AP
A snowboarder catches air at a resort in Maine. A recent Dartmouth report reveals that resorts report an average of 23 percent more snow on weekends than during the week.
Published: January 04, 2010
Researchers at Dartmouth College have confirmed something that skiers and snowboarders have long suspected: Resorts sometimes boost their snowfall reports to attract more customers.
Eric Zitzewitz and Jon Zinman are both associate professors of economics and fans of snow sports. In their report, Wintertime for Deceptive Advertising, they found that ski areas report more snowfall on the weekends, and that there is no such "weekend effect" in government weather data.
Zinman says they gathered snowfall totals from ski area Web sites and then compared those numbers with government weather data. According to Zinman, resorts reported 23 percent more snow on weekends. And the resorts that had the most to gain by fluffing up their numbers did more of it.
According to Zinman, resorts with more people living within driving distance inflated their numbers more, as did resorts that don't offer money-back guarantees.
The researchers didn’t single out specific resorts in their report, choosing instead to make broad statements about the industry as a whole.
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