Annual Study Finds Skier Numbers In 21/22 Season Returning to Pre-Pandemic Numbers
An annual worldwide survey of the global ski industry has found that despite the continuing challenges of the global pandemic, the 21-22 ski season was one of the most successful ever, in terms of the number of people recorded taking to the ski slopes.
According to research carried out for the newly published 15th edition of the International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism, the 21/22 winter season saw a very decent total of more than 370 million skier visits worldwide. That’s up by more than a third on the previous ‘lockdown winter’ of 20/21 which saw a dramatic drop to only 201 million skier visits recorded worldwide.
”Since the beginning of the 2000s, and before the covid-19 pandemic, yearly visitation to ski resorts has been varying mainly due to weather and snow conditions and has been fluctuating between 323 and 389 million skier visits worldwide,” industry expert and report author and Laurent Vanat explained, adding, “After two difficult years impacted by covid-19 pandemic, ski business recovered pretty well. Globally, the 2021/22 attendance at ski resorts is in the average of last 20 years and some countries even clocked their best ever skier visits number.”
Mr Vanat said the performance has been driven, among other things, by:
• Favourable weather conditions in many places. Even if snowfall were sometimes limited, cold enough temperatures and sunny days provided for good skiing conditions;
• A renewed desire for outdoor activities and domestic destinations, which benefited to the ski areas (of which largest markets are domestic);
• An easing of the pandemic restrictions in many countries;
• The development of the ski industry in some Eastern European countries, scoring unprecedented skier visits number over the very recent years;
• China resuming its skier visits growth with the enthusiasm brought by Beijing 2022 Olympics, and despite still prevalent covid-19 restrictions;
• The resumption of lifts renewals after a year 2020 where works in progress were on hold for several weeks or months.
Globally, Mr vanat found that there has been a return to normal level of skier attendance. However, considered at country level, there are winners and losers in the 2021/22 winter season.
Visitation at ski resorts have still been more affected by the pandemic restrictions in some countries than in others, as was already the case over previous season. While in the United States, it was more than back to business as usual, and China resumed with its growth path, and some other western countries saw a revival in attendance, Austria missed the start of the season and Japan, Italy and Germany still suffered. France did pretty well, with attendance reaching 2% above the five-year average of the last pre-covid-19 seasons.
Besides the updated figures on the ski business worldwide, the 2023 International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism also brings an overview of the state of the worldwide industry and its challenges.
“Despite the environment around the ski business continues to be more difficult that it was before the pandemic, winter 2021/22 can be considered as a season of hope for the industry,” said Mr Vanat, adding, “However, it is obvious that this season is also opening on more intense global challenges to the industry. On the one hand, the world has become more hostile. Be it the environment, the geostrategy, the politics, the media, the public opinion. All seem to unite against the ski industry. On the other hand, the transparency, common sense, objectivity and capacity to evaluate a situation without passion and bias seem to have become scarcer and scarcer, not to say to have disappeared. False information repeated frequently enough have become considered as truth and become believed at the government level as well. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as political agendas or simply a lack of accurate information and can lead to harmful policies or actions.”
The International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism covers 68 countries in the world that offer ski areas with lifts. Besides the main ski nations, smaller countries covered include Cyprus, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkey and many more.
