July 30, 2009
Partly Due to the Recession a Lot of Ski Companies Are Cutting Their Amount of Catered Ski Chalets
Because of the down turn skiing bookings went down last ski season.
Even with excellent early holiday sales along with great snow fall.
These falls in numbers follows five seasons of successive development in the snowboarding industry, and the numbers decreased from 1.15 million two winters ago to 850000 last ski season.
This is in part due to holiday makers giving their annual ski holiday a miss, whilst other skiers who’d commonly take two skiing holidays, only had one.
Sales for the independent travel sector fell by 15% with some low cost airlines reducing the amount of their routes to certain airports.
However tour operators also saw the reservations reducing by a similar 15%.
Even so, the top 6 tour operators market share rested at just over 70% and France continued to remain the most popular skiing destination with around 37% of the market.
This meant that several large tour operators lowered the number of luxury catered chalets they operate this year.
The catered chalet markets will surely see a a drop in no.s due to the fact that a luxury catered chalet costs the operator more with regards to chefs and lease when it is unsold.
It’s unlikely therefore that we will see the type of skiing holiday deals which were available last year.
Although costs are expected to increase, they probably won’t go up considerably.
The 2009/10 season doubtless presents grievous issues for an industry which is influenced by the outcomes of the global recession, weakness of the pound, higher fuel costs as well as large fixed operating costs for snowboarding companies.
This season snowboarders will become more cost aware, this will contribute to a reversal of the last years that witnessed a increase in the ski industry.
