Winter sports without snow?: Ski resorts face a dilemma

Winter sports without snow?
Ski resorts face a dilemma

By Sebastian Schneider
01/15/2023 5:26 p.m

The unusually mild winter breaks numerous temperature records. The slopes have no more snow, many ski areas in the Alps remain closed. But what do those who make a living from ski tourism do? You are faced with a difficult question.

They are bizarre pictures: Where winter sports enthusiasts normally smash down the slopes on a snow-white surface, the ski slopes now look amazingly green for January. One who can attest to this is Steffen Reich from the German Alpine Club (DAV). There he heads the department for nature conservation and was recently in the Alps. “It’s really the case that you have white bands in a green landscape. There is practically no snow in the landscape up to maybe 1500 meters,” he says in an interview with ntv.de. Only above that there is natural snow in the landscape in addition to the artificial snow. “In all other German ski areas, only individual slopes are in operation.”

When asked by ntv.de, Antonia Asenstorfer described what actually sounds like a death knell for winter sports as a “dream start” to the season. She is press spokeswoman for “Alpen Plus” and is responsible for four ski areas in Upper Bavaria, all of which are at an altitude of around 1500 meters. And the start of the winter season was actually good for the operators, because it was really cold in Germany at the beginning of December.

The big problem arose a little later. After the holidays, the “almost traditional Christmas thaw” set in, as Asenstorfer describes it. The unusually mild winter broke all temperature records in Germany on New Year’s Day. In Bavaria, for example, where winter sports enthusiasts usually freeze in ski underwear on the slope at temperatures around freezing point, it was almost 20 degrees this year. And now many Alpine regions are missing what many places actually live on: snow. In Brauneck, one of the four “Alpen Plus” regions, no one skis anymore.

“Economically not so bad”

It is reasonable to assume that the snow crisis will quickly turn into an economic crisis. But that is not yet apparent. “At the moment, especially in the high-altitude ski areas, it doesn’t look that bad economically,” says Marius Mayer in an interview with ntv.de. The professor of tourism teaches at the Munich University of Applied Sciences. The good Christmas season can be explained by the fact that people have not canceled their bookings – also thanks to the cold spell before the holidays. The damage would not have been insignificant. “Depending on the destination, the Christmas season accounts for 20 to 30 percent of sales,” says Mayer.

The next important phase of the winter season does not follow until February, and it lasts until Easter. How successful the winter was can be estimated using a rule of thumb: A ski area has to be in operation for about 100 days to cover the running costs. If it is next to a big city, the time maybe a little shorter.

It only becomes a problem if the winter season continues to melt. As early as 2013, the German Alpine Club published a study for the Bavarian regions, which suggests that the snow will disappear over time. The environmentalists can just watch as their predictions gradually come true. If things continue like this, in ten years almost half of the Bavarian areas can no longer guarantee snow – even with snow cannons.

In the long term, the Alpine regions will face economic difficulties. There are no exact figures, but according to tourism expert Mayer there are around 6000 municipalities in the Alps. Of these, about seven percent would have developed a veritable winter sports monoculture. That doesn’t sound like much at first, the around 600 ski areas are only concentrated on a fraction of the Alps. Not all regions of the mountains are only dependent on ski tourism, but there are large regional dependencies – especially in Austria.

Supply also needs demand

The operators are therefore in a quandary. “The crux is that a lot of money is spent in tourism,” says Mayer. In many winter sports resorts, the core business of skiing cannot be replaced. And at the moment it is not necessary, because the business model mostly still works. But the more they try to earn money with winter tourism, the more they become entangled in dependencies.

Snow resorts are ready not only to rely on snow cannons for this. For example in Kitzbühel: The posh Austrian town also has an altitude problem – it is just under 800 meters. With a trick, your winter season starts earlier than everyone else. They store snow from the previous season under rigid foam panels. The “Depot-Skipiste” is already skiable in October. Elsewhere, however, it can be more bizarre: In Switzerland, a helicopter should fly snow from one slope to another. “In an emergency you have to try things out,” said Matthias In-Albon, head of Bergbahnen Gstaad. the SRF. It just didn’t do anything.

Such actions pose new problems. “The question is whether customers will go along with it and how the public will judge it,” says Mayer. Technically produced snow in particular has a bad image among non-skiers. The Bavarian Economics Minister Hubert Aiwanger recently weighed debates about this as “ideological” away. After all, the artificial replacement saved the season for many. But the systems don’t just consume electricity. DAV expert Reich notes that large reservoirs would be built for this purpose, which could rarely be filled with rainwater alone. Apart from that, the snow cannons are not the biggest climate problem anyway: almost 80 percent of the CO2 emissions are caused by holidaymakers when they arrive.

The market is shrinking

But apart from the sustainability problems, the industry is again facing difficult times after the corona pandemic. At the latest, the climate crisis is letting ski areas die quietly. “The market as a whole is not only stagnating, it is even tending to shrink,” says Mayer. The industry will continue to “shrink to health,” he predicts. The aging society alone is responsible for this. “Fewer and fewer children are learning to ski, so they won’t practice it as adults either,” says Mayer. Then there are the prices, which could make winter holidays even more exclusive: this winter, some areas like Ischgl broke the 60-euro mark for a day pass. In 2019 it still cost around 50 euros therenow it’s 67 euros.

The lack of snow makes regions creative. The last time it was so mild, in winter 2015, spokeswoman Asenstorfer’s ski association in Upper Bavaria opened a summer gondola lift in the supposedly cold season. When asked, she says that her ski areas traditionally offer a year-round offer, so they are not exclusively dependent on winter. DAV expert Reich also lists numerous activities in the Alps that don’t need much snow or no snow at all: tobogganing, cross-country skiing, hiking, mountain biking. The only question is whether as much money can be made as in mass ski tourism. Not all areas start from scratch when adjusting. In the Tyrolean Unterland there are municipalities, says tourism expert Mayer, where the turnover ratios between the winter and summer seasons are around 50/50.

“Many areas are already considering what year-round offers could be,” says Reich. Some build lifts that are equally useful in summer and winter. Others are investing in the infrastructure: the cable car company of Ischgl, which is actually snow-sure, recently invested 75 million euros in a new, huge one thermal bath invested. And if you want to continue skiing, you can still go to the higher elevations, such as the Zugspitze. There will be snow for a long time.