Skiing facilities
This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating downhill and cross-country skiing areas, and equipment such as ski lifts and tows. These establishments often provide food and beverage services, equipment rental services and ski instruction services. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 238
- Under 10 employeesA
- 21%
- Establishments · USA
- 350
- Employment · USA
- 68,247
- Payroll · USA
- $1.2B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 238 Canadian establishments with employees, 21% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 713, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.
Facility businesses — gyms, golf, ski, marinas, entertainment centres — with high fixed cost and revenue that follows weather, seasons and discretionary income. Gambling is a licensed exception.
- Who sets the price
- The operator, within what a local catchment will pay.
- The software it runs on
- Membership and class booking, tee sheets, point of sale, gaming management.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 7139 Other amusement and recreation industries covers it.
Every layer of this market already belongs to a consolidator, and the public-course end is paid for in tee times rather than cash. Private clubs — member billing, statements, F&B minimums, dues, events — are held by Jonas Club Software, a Constellation Software company since 2003 that says it serves over 2,300 clubs in 20 countries [C, vendor], and by Clubessential, which merged into Advent-backed Xplor in a deal announced in September 2025 and closed in March 2026, creating a group with nearly $900 million of revenue across fitness, golf and club, recreation and field services [B]. Northstar (Alpharetta, Georgia) is the third private-club system, claims 1,500+ clubs and has bought its way into Australia by acquiring MiClub in 2021 [C, vendor]. Public golf is a separate fight, and GolfNow sets its price. GolfNow — owned by Comcast's Golf Channel from 2008 and now by Versant, spun off from Comcast in January 2026 [B] — says it reaches 3.9 million golfers and is connected to more than 9,000 courses [C, vendor; B, encyclopaedic]. It bundles tee sheet, POS and payments and is paid partly by barter: the course hands over tee times that GolfNow resells. The US course owners' association published a 62-page guide in 2020 called 'Beware of Barter' arguing it drives needless discounting [A, association]. Golf Inc. put GolfNow at 61% of the public-course software market in 2021 [B]. The cash-priced alternatives are already consolidated too: foreUP (Clubessential/Xplor since February 2021; claims 2,000+ courses), Lightspeed Golf (Chronogolf, bought by Lightspeed in 2019; 1,800 courses claimed), Club Caddie (Jonas since 2020, sold explicitly as 'cost certainty in lieu of barter') and Teesnap (Allegiant-founded, TELEO Capital growth investment in 2021) [B/C]. The anti-barter wedge exists but has been taken. Every cash-priced vendor already sells against barter, so it is a positioning, not an opening. The newest independent — TenFore Golf, $7M Series A led by Blueprint Equity in January 2026 [B] — is attacking municipal and multi-course operators with exactly that pitch; Whoosh ($6M seed led by Craft Ventures, 2022 [B]) chose the private-club tee sheet. Both are small next to the incumbents, and the lock-in (member ledgers, statement history, the tee sheet, and on public courses a marketplace that brings golfers) makes switches slow. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: neither Constellation nor Xplor is vulnerable, and the barter-fatigue gap is crowded.
Buying a course is buying irrigation, drainage, fleet and land, then hoping for weather. Rounds have recovered from their long decline and that recovery is already priced into the courses worth having; the ones for sale are usually being valued by the buyer as future land rather than as an operating business, which is a rezoning bet with a maintenance bill attached.
The booking marketplace won, and it has just been recapitalised to take the back office too. Dockwa began in Newport in 2015 as transient-slip booking for boaters and now says it serves nearly 4,000 marinas, 97% of the top 95 US harbours and more than 450,000 boaters [C, vendor]. In June 2026 it took an undisclosed strategic growth investment from PSG to turn that into a full operating system — contracts and billing, fuel-dock and ship-store point of sale, electric metering, dry-stack launch scheduling, dynamic pricing and a consumer marketplace in Marinas.com — and named Canada and Europe as the expansion targets [C, vendor release]. It publishes its prices: a free leads tier, then modules from $169 a month for transient booking, $180 for contracts, $249 for POS, $199 for fuel and $99 for dry stack [C, vendor, checked 2026-10-08]. That is the price an entrant would have to undercut, and it is already low and modular. The back office is held by two consolidators rather than a startup. DockMaster — the 1983 system for marinas, boatyards and dealers, claiming 1,000+ marinas [C, vendor] — has been inside Valsoft since 2017 and added its own payments product [C, acquirer]. Storable, the EQT-controlled self-storage platform, bought Molo in 2021 and now sells it as Storable Marine alongside its payments and rental products [B]. Outside the US the field is owned by roll-ups and old desktop vendors: Pacsoft in New Zealand went to Jonas Software in 2019 [B], and Havenstar and Harba (Denmark) each claim one to two hundred marinas [C, vendor]. Payments are the business model in every case, so a new vendor would be selling software that the incumbents treat as a loss leader for card and ACH volume. The Canadian angle is real but closing. Dockwa's own Canada page says that for years it did not support Canadian dollars and boaters had to pay in US dollars; that gap is now fixed and the PSG money is aimed at Canada [C, vendor]. The local alternatives found were thin: Swift Harbour, a BC-made booking app, now returns an unconfigured site, and Sentinel Hill's Marina Mate domain is parked. A Canadian wedge would have been plausible three years ago; today it means racing a funded incumbent into its stated next market.
The price ceiling is set by budget chains charging under $20 a month and the cost floor by commercial rent, and the gap has to be filled with instructor-led classes whose members follow the instructor when the instructor leaves. Churn is the business's defining number and it is structurally high. The studio management software at this code is screened separately.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch. What the subsector typically runs on: Membership and class booking, tee sheets, point of sale, gaming management.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Arts, entertainment and recreation, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.