The State of Ski Rental Digital Marketing 2026: Most Rental Shops Are Still Letting the Snow Decide Their Revenue

If the snow is deciding your revenue, your marketing is not doing its job.

If you are not actively marketing online at the moment, that is your chance to grow. Good online marketing brings your bookings in earlier, brings more of them direct, and gives you a season that is more predictable and less reliant on snowfall. Your marketing should be what decides your revenue, not the snow, and having it set up properly is what gives you that confidence.

Used properly, digital marketing is one of the surest ways to future-proof your business. More revenue lets you grow your team. It might mean more time off, or more powder days. If selling is the direction you are heading, it positions the business for an eventual sale. And if you are not growing and are worried about revenue, it can be the thing that stops you closing the doors.

And if you are already advertising, the real question is whether you can see the insights we set out later in this article, and the benefits that come with them.

Having worked with ski and snowboard rental businesses around the world for many seasons, we wanted to know the true state of digital marketing across the industry. So we audited the websites of 1,550 ski and snowboard rental businesses across North America and Europe, and spent more than 50 hours checking them by hand.

Most rental shops cannot see where their bookings come from. Four in ten have no analytics at all. One in five cannot be booked online. And where the booking happens on another website, the tracking follows the customer on about one site in twenty.

Your marketing data is a business asset. Whether your store takes a few hundred thousand dollars in bookings a season or several million, knowing where your customers come from and what they spend makes the business more valuable. It is easier to grow and easier to sell. A store that cannot track its bookings, or takes most of them through third-party platforms, has handed that value to somebody else and never owns its customers. It is the same way online travel agencies came to take over so much of the tourism industry.

It is also what makes your advertising work. You may have heard of remarketing: the ads that follow you around after you have looked at a website. They keep a store in front of a customer while they are still researching and comparing. Remarketing, and most of what makes Google and Meta advertising effective, depends on your website feeding the right data back to those platforms. Without that set up, those ads are impossible to run. And if you are advertising without it, you are flying blind: spending the budget everywhere and hoping, instead of putting it where it brings bookings.

If you own a rental shop, the numbers below describe the market you compete in, and there is a decent chance they describe you. How we did the research is at the end of the article.

What we found, in short

Cohort of 1,689 business listings in 11 countries, of which 1,550 rental websites were read in full. Audited between August and October 2026.

Finding 1: four in ten rental shops have no analytics at all

603 of the 1,550 ski rental websites we audited have no analytics of any kind. No Google Analytics, no Google Tag Manager, nothing that counts a visitor. That is 38.9%.

It is worse in Europe (42.2%) than in North America (35.5%). Part of that gap comes from European cookie law, and we come back to it in Finding 7.

What it means for your business. If this is your shop, the website might be doing well or it might be doing poorly, and you have no way of knowing which. You cannot see how many people visited last season, which pages they read, where they came from, or how many went on to book. The website is likely one of the biggest sources of bookings you have, and it is the one you can see least.

What it means for your marketing. Every decision about where to spend next season is being made on instinct. The instinct is often good. Nobody can check it, though, so the marketing that works and the marketing that does nothing look exactly the same.

Installing analytics is the first step, and only the first step. Google Analytics is free to install, but out of the box it counts visitors and little else. Your bookings, your phone calls and the hand-off to your booking system all have to be configured before it tells you anything you can act on. That configuration is where the value is, and it is what the rest of this study is about. Every season without it is a season of data you can never get back.

Finding 2: at least one in five rental shops cannot be booked online

319 of the 1,550 rental websites have no way to book a rental online. 176 in North America and 143 in Europe. Every one was confirmed by a person who went through the site looking for a way to book. That makes one in five the lowest the figure can be, because we only counted the shops where somebody checked by hand.

What it means for your business. Customers today have a hundred things on. They look at the same thing several times and decide over days or weeks. If your offer and your competitor's are much the same, and only theirs can be booked and confirmed online, there is a good chance the booking goes to them, because it is one less thing to sort out when they arrive.

What it means for your marketing. Without an online booking there is nothing for your marketing to be measured against. You can count people walking through the door and try to guess which of them saw an ad or a listing, but that is an estimate, and a vague one. Every other finding in this study assumes there is a booking to track. For these shops, there is not.

Finding 3: the booking hand-off, and why your numbers look wrong

This is the most important finding in the study, and it is the hardest one to explain, so here it is in one picture.

Most ski rental shops do not take the booking on their own website. You click Book Now and you end up on another company's system: the rental software, the booking engine, the network that handles the reservation. A browser treats those as two unrelated visits. The moment somebody moves from your website to the booking system, the journey starts again from nothing, unless somebody has set up the tracking to follow them across. That setting is called cross-domain tracking.

Where a shop has analytics on its site and the booking happens somewhere else, the tracking followed the customer across on about one site in twenty. 13 of the 273 sites where we could test the hand-off. In North America it was 9 of 139, in Europe 4 of 134. Our tourism study found around one in ten. Ski rental is about half that.

What you see in your reports when it is broken. The booking still happens. Your analytics records it as a new visit with no history, so it is filed under "direct", or under a referral from your own website. The ski guide, the resort listing, the tourism board page or the ad that sent that customer gets no credit at all. It makes no difference how the customer first found you. A Google search, a Google ad, an Instagram ad or a referring website: if the hand-off is broken, the booking is filed under direct.

What it means for your business.

• Your sources are wrong, and wrong in a consistent direction. Everything that sends you a visitor before the booking is undercounted. "Direct" is overcounted, because it is where the lost bookings end up.
• You cannot compare one season with the next. If the set-up changes, or the booking system changes, the numbers move for reasons that have nothing to do with your customers. A season that looks like a drop in referrals can be a change in where the tracking breaks.
• You cannot value your partners. Whether the listing on the resort website pays for itself is a question your reports should answer. With a broken hand-off, they cannot.

What it means for your marketing. If you advertise, the ad platform never learns which of its visitors went on to book. It optimises towards the clicks it can see, not the customers who pay you. With the booking data flowing back, Google and Meta can find more people like the ones who book, so the same budget works harder.

Not sure whether your own booking hand-off works? Book a Ski Growth Call and we will check it with you.

One thing we found while testing this. On 20 rental websites, a booking vendor's own analytics tag loads with its booking widget. The vendor can see the shop's visitors. On three of those sites it is the only analytics present, so the shop sees nothing at all.

Finding 4: where the booking happens decides how hard the tracking is

This is the finding we did not expect, and it changes the advice.

The story is where the booking happens. On general ecommerce software, 87% of bookings happen on the shop's own site, so the data stays with the shop. With specialist rental software, 97% happen off the shop's site or inside an embedded booking window, so cross-domain tracking has to be set up before anyone can see them. Paying for specialist software gets you a better rental tool, not better marketing data. It also creates a tracking job most shops do not know exists.

Shops on specialist rental software are no better measured for it. Of the ones taking bookings online, 29.4% track nothing, against 20.4% on general ecommerce software.

None of this is a reason to change your booking system. Specialist rental software exists because a rental is not a product sale: dates, sizes, skill levels, deposits, damage waivers and returns. Choose the system that handles your rentals properly. Then make sure the tracking is set up to follow your customer into it, and ask how that works before you sign.

Franchises and booking networks

In Europe, a large share of rental shops belong to a franchise or take bookings through a rental network. Around three in ten European rental websites show a sign of a chain, franchise or shared booking network, against fewer than one in ten in North America. That is the lowest the figure can be, because many franchise shops trade under a local name and only the booking link gives them away.

Networks and marketplaces bring real benefits. They put a small shop in front of skiers it would never reach on its own, and there is nothing for the shop to set up or manage. That last part is also the trade-off. A platform that asks you to set up and manage nothing is a platform that holds the customer relationship. The booking, the customer's details and the data about where they came from sit with the network, not with you.

That can be the right choice for a shop. It should be made knowingly, with the cost in data understood as well as the cost in commission. The shops on these networks in our study track nothing on 39.3% of sites that take bookings online, the highest of any group.

Finding 5: one in three advertise, and many cannot see whether it works

509 of the 1,550 sites, 32.8%, have an advertising tag installed: a Google Ads tag, a Meta pixel, or both.

What these tags are. A Google Ads tag and a Meta pixel are small pieces of code on your website that feed data back to the ad platforms. They record who has visited your site, which is what lets you show ads to those people again later (remarketing). And when they are configured properly, they tell Google and Meta which visitors went on to book, so the platforms can find more people like them. Setting them up to send the right data depends partly on your booking system, and it is the part most often left undone. A tag on the site does not prove a shop is spending money this season. It does show that somebody set up advertising at some point, because a tag does not arrive by accident.

77 of those 509, 15.1%, have no analytics on the site. These are not shops that never bothered with marketing. They tried advertising, and they have no way of seeing what it did. It is no surprise that so many shop owners tell us ads do not work.

What it means for your marketing. If you are running ads without sending the booking back to the ad platform, you are paying for clicks and hoping. Some of the budget is reaching people who were never going to book, and the platform has no way to learn the difference. Shops that think their ads are working could often get far more from the same spend, because a campaign that knows which visitors book can find more of them.

What good booking data shows you, from our own client work. For one rental store, we tracked online bookings back to the ad and split them by where the visitor was browsing from. Visitors from overseas returned 6.2 times their ad spend, against 2.2 times for visitors from the home market. The customer who books before they travel was worth about three times the local. That is a budget decision you can only make if the booking is tracked back to the ad.

If you are advertising and cannot see what it brings back, that is exactly what a Ski Growth Call is for.

Finding 6: the phone call is clickable, and almost nobody counts it

57% of rental websites have a phone number you can tap. On 4% of those, the click is recorded. Email is the same story: 971 sites with a clickable email address, 32 recording the click.

For a rental shop the phone call is often the booking. Groups, families, people who want to talk about sizes, people who want to know whether there is snow. None of it shows up in the reports of 96 shops in every 100.

Advertisers are better at this, but not by much. Of the sites with an advertising tag, 7.2% record clicks on the phone number, against 2.1% of sites without one. Three times more likely, and still 13 advertisers in every 14 cannot see the calls their ads produce.

What it means for your marketing. A phone click recorded as a conversion is a booking signal an ad platform can learn from. Not recording it means that, for a shop whose customers like to ring, the ad account is blind to a large share of what it produced.

Finding 7: North America advertises more, and measures no better

North American shops are about twice as likely to have an advertising tag (43.9% against 22.2%) and less likely to have no analytics at all (35.5% against 42.2%). On the measures that turn marketing into bookings, the two are the same: 3.9% of North American shops record the phone click, against 4.0% in Europe.

North America has more advertising and more budget behind it, and the phone call still goes uncounted at the same rate. The missing piece is the set-up, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Europe has a bigger problem with bookings that track nothing. A third of European shops taking bookings online (33.3%) record nothing, against 15.6% in North America.

Part of Europe's gap is the cookie banner. European privacy law means analytics often waits for the visitor to accept cookies before it loads. 98 sites had analytics installed that our browser never saw load, and 42 of those sit behind a cookie consent tool, most of them in Europe. Waiting for consent is correct behaviour, and it has a cost: analytics that waits for consent only records the visitors who accept, so a European shop's reports can show a fraction of its real traffic.

Austria stands out. Six in ten Austrian rental websites have no analytics. We do not know why, and franchises do not explain it: Austria's share of chain shops is about the same as Switzerland's and lower than France's, and both of those score better.

Finding 8: 96.7% of rental websites fail Google's own speed standard

We measure page speed with Google's own tool, on a mobile connection, from a first-time visitor's position.

The median ski rental website takes 9.6 seconds to show its main content. Google's threshold for "good" is 2.5 seconds. 3.3% of rental sites meet it, and one in eight takes more than 20 seconds.

You will probably not recognise this from using your own site. You see it on good wifi, on a device that has already loaded half of it. Your customer sees it on mobile data in a resort, deciding between you and the shop across the road.

A slow site costs you in ways you can never fully measure:

• Search rankings. Site speed is part of your search engine optimisation (SEO), and Google ranks slow sites lower. If your rankings suffer, people may not see your website at all, because very few customers go on to page two or three of Google.
• What you pay for each ad click. Google charges more when the page people land on is slow. If you are spending money on ads, that money is not working as hard as it could.
• Customers who give up. People do not wait. If they leave before your page appears, they may well book with your competitor instead.

None of this lost revenue shows up as a line in your accounts, because you never find out about it. People simply do not keep going.

Finding 9: most rental shops do not tell Google what they do

Every web page has a title tag: the line Google shows in blue in its search results, and one of the strongest signals it uses to decide what a page is about. This is what we found on the homepage title tags of the 1,550 rental websites.

Almost three in four North American rental shops do not say "rental" in the title of their homepage. One in three rental websites says neither ski nor rental, so the page Google relies on most does not say what the business does.

This is an indication of how good the search engine optimisation is across these stores. It is one of the first things we look at when a business calls us. It is usually a good reflection of the rest of their marketing, because it is the easiest thing to fix. It does not depend on what your competitors are doing, and getting it right can improve your position in Google quickly.

One caveat. Some of these stores are retail shops as well as rental shops, and their rental pages may be more specific than the homepage. Take this as an insight, not a hard finding. In over 15 years of digital marketing, it is still the quickest way we know to judge the overall state of a website, a bit like a roofer glancing up at a house and having a fair idea of what they will find before the ladder goes up.

Finding 10: the things we found while looking for something else

None of these was what we set out to measure.

A Book Now button with one old customer's visit stuck inside it. Somebody copied the address of the booking page out of their own browser and pasted it in as the link. That address carried their own tracking details with it. The site looks as if it is tracking bookings, but every customer reaches the booking system as a stranger.

Tracking that sends data nowhere. Some websites still have the example code from their website template in place of a real analytics account. It looks installed. It records nothing.

Rental websites that now send visitors to gambling sites. At least four web addresses in the study now point somewhere else entirely. Unfortunately, this is probably a sign that some stores have closed their doors in the last 12 months.

A booking link to a cancelled account. The rental page sends customers to a booking system that tells them the account has been cancelled and to contact the merchant.

Booking forms that go nowhere. A form posting to a domain that no longer exists, and a booking widget still showing its closed-season message well into October.

Out-of-date prices. A rate card on a live rental page that was four seasons old.

Each of these is a small job for somebody who knows where to look, and each is costing more than the fix would.

The insights you get when your data is set up correctly

We have worked with ski and snowboard rental stores around the world for a number of seasons. Once the data is set up correctly the first time, what it tells you about your store goes far beyond a visitor count:

• Your average order value at different points in the season.
• Your average order value by where your guests come from, so you know which markets to spend on.
• Which sources bring revenue, not just visitors: Google, your ads, your emails, the resort listing, the tourism board.
• How far ahead your customers book, and whether that is changing season on season.
• The effect of ending your early-bird offer earlier or later.
• How the season is shaping up before the lifts open, if you start marketing early.
• Your return on advertising spend, so you can put more behind what pays and stop what does not.

You can only be confident in your results when you have good data and good conversion tracking. Without it, you do not know what is working and what is not, and marketing ends up being doubted: the good work cannot prove what it did, so it gets cut along with the bad. With it, marketing becomes an investment you can measure, and a profit centre you can steer.

Some examples from our own work with rental shops:

• When to end the early-bird offer. With bookings tracked, one shop could see that moving its early-bird deadline a month later moved the booking rush with it, instead of reading the spike as a sudden jump in demand.
• What customers spend. Over three weeks of one August, bookings were up 3.2% and revenue up 9.8%, because customers were spending more per booking. Tracking the order value showed it, and showed which offers drove it.
• Whether a new website paid off. After a new site launched, the in-season conversion rate went from 3.71% to 4.21% and held.
• Whether email newsletters pay off. In the first season we sent email newsletters for one shop, pre-season revenue rose 671%. We only know that with confidence because the email traffic was tracked through to the booking.

Snowfall matters less than you think, and we measured it

This season we tracked snowfall against bookings for two clients, one in each hemisphere.

In the Southern Hemisphere, we compared daily snowfall at the local resorts with the client's ad impressions, ad clicks and website visits across the whole season. There was no meaningful link, whether we looked at the same day or up to five days later. One big dump coincided with a bump, and that was it. The season's best weekend for revenue came with no rise in traffic at all: the same number of visitors simply booked at three times the usual rate. A weekend in the middle of a nine-day dry spell converted better than five snowier weekends.

In the Northern Hemisphere, a US client grew rental revenue by 18% in one of its area's worst snow seasons on record.

Snow still matters to skiers. What decides which shop they book is the marketing. Better marketing wins a bigger share of the customers who are booking anyway, and the dependence on snowfall becomes much less obvious. The alternative is waiting for people to walk past the shop, or to stumble on a website Google barely shows.

The bigger picture: getting the customer sorted before they arrive

We have spent whole seasons living in ski resorts, and the same thing happens every winter. People arrive and walk from shop to shop comparing prices, with half a day of their holiday gone before they have been near a lift.

The job of good digital marketing is to change that behaviour: show the benefit of booking a good price before arriving, so the customer comes in, collects the equipment quickly, and gets more time on the mountain and more value from the holiday. Measurement is what tells you whether it is working.

The questions to ask your booking system

Ask these when you set a system up, or before you sign with a new one.

1. Do you have documentation on setting up analytics and conversion tracking with your platform? No documentation is usually the whole answer.
2. Do you support cross-domain tracking, and what do we need to add to our website for it to work? This is the hand-off in Finding 3.
3. If the booking opens in a window on our page, how does the tracking survive it? Embedded booking windows often break tracking because of how browsers handle cookies inside them. Ask to see the documentation.
4. What can you send back as a conversion? Only the completed booking, or the earlier steps too: dates chosen, equipment added, checkout started?
5. Do you send the same booking to Google Ads and the Meta pixel? And does it carry the booking value, so the ad platforms can learn which customers are worth most?
6. Who owns the customer's details after the booking? Especially if you take bookings through a network or marketplace.

Where to start

1. Install analytics if you have none, and configure it to record your bookings and phone calls. Every season without it is a season of data you never get back.
2. Click through your own booking journey and check whether the tracking follows you onto the booking system. This is the one that matters most.
3. Record your phone and email clicks. For most rental shops the phone call is part of the booking.
4. If you advertise, send the booking back to the ad platform, with its value.
5. Test your website speed on a phone, on mobile data, not on the shop wifi.
6. Check your homepage title says what you rent and where.
7. Check your booking links for anything pasted in, out of date or broken.

What we have done for ski and snowboard rental shops

We work with ski and snowboard rental shops around the world. Here is what good tracking and good marketing have looked like for some of them:

• A US rental shop, in one of its area's worst snow seasons on record: rental revenue up 18% and 13% more rentals out the door, at 4.3 times its Google Ads spend. (Read the case study)
• A rental shop we started email marketing for: pre-season revenue up 671% in the first season we started sending email newsletters, with Google Ads returning 12.9 times its spend.
• A ski rental and mountain transport business: 14 times its Google Ads spend across a full season, and 36 times in the best month of its latest season.
• A rental store: 4.7 times its Google Ads spend across the season, and the out-of-town customer worth about three times the local.

Find out what your own data is not telling you

If any of this sounds like your shop, the next step is a conversation.

Book a Ski Growth Call. We look at your website, your booking hand-off and your marketing, and tell you straight what is working, what is broken and what we would do first for the season ahead.

If you would rather go straight to the detail, the Comprehensive Digital Review and Action Plan is this study done on your business alone, with a prioritised plan. If you already know the tracking is the problem, the Digital Foundation Setup fixes it. More on how we work with rental shops: conversion tracking, Google Ads and email marketing.

How we did the research

We started with every ski and snowboard rental business we could find on Google. 1,689 business listings across 11 countries: the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Andorra, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Close to half are in North America and half in Europe, which makes a fair comparison between the two.

We then read each website the way a customer would use it. A browser opened every site, clicked through to the rental booking where there was one, and recorded what tracking was installed and what fired. We then read the source code of every site a second time, because a tag that waits for a cookie banner to be accepted does not fire for an automated browser, and we did not want to count a tag as missing when it was sitting there waiting.

The automation was not trusted on its own. Around 700 sites were opened and worked through by a person, twice. Anything we were not confident about was checked by hand before it counted. Where the two disagreed on whether a site had analytics, it was checked a third time.

Sites we could not read were held out, not counted as failures. Dead websites, sites that blocked us, and 21 businesses that turned out to rent bikes, hotel rooms or something else entirely were removed. That leaves 1,550 rental websites read in full: 761 in North America and 789 in Europe.

A note on precision. Any study done this way has a margin of error, and we would rather say so. Treat the decimal places as indicative and the scale of each finding as solid. Where a figure rests on a small number of sites, we say so, or we leave it out.

A note on the businesses. Most are independent rental shops. Some are resorts that rent equipment, some are ski schools, and in Europe a large share belong to a franchise or a rental network. We report the market as a whole, and we split it where the split changes the story. No business is named.

What we cannot tell you

Everything in this study was gathered without a login. No access to anybody's analytics, booking system or ad account. It is all publicly visible, for anyone who knows where to look.

That means we can see whether the measurement works. We cannot see who set it up, or why it is missing. It might be the shop, a web developer, an agency, or the booking vendor. From the outside they all look the same, so we are not publishing a table of which booking systems track well. The data cannot support it, and getting it wrong would cost somebody business.

Two things we did not measure. We did not record whether the Meta pixel follows the customer into the booking system, only whether it is on the shop's own website. And the share of shops that cannot be booked online is a minimum, for the reason given in Finding 2.

Our tourism study, three years on

This is the first season we have run this survey for ski rental, but we have run the same study for tourism for the last three years. All the talk in tourism is about AI and advanced techniques, and none of the basics have really moved in those three years. Read the State of Tourism Digital Marketing 2026.

This is the first edition of our research into ski and snowboard rental digital marketing. We audited 1,550 rental websites in 11 countries between August and October 2026, using only publicly available information. No business is named. If you use these figures, please credit Fully Charged Media and link to this article. See also our complete guide to digital marketing for ski and snowboard rental businesses and the State of Tourism Digital Marketing 2026.