Impact of snow variability on the Swiss winter tourism sector: implications in an era of climate change

Abstract

With its numerous mountain regions and its well developed winter tourism infrastructures, Switzerland is a country whose tourism sector is known to be sensitive to snowpack variability. With climate change-which is predicted to have negative impacts on snow depths and duration-the need for accurately assessing the sensitivity of winter tourism consumption to changing snow conditions is reinforced. Taking advantage of newly available data on visitation rates at Swiss ski areas, we analyze the effect of snow conditions on skier visits using standard panel data regression techniques. We assume the magnitude of this effect to be conditional on the level of snowmaking investments. Higher snowmaking investments should lead to a lower sensitivity. Our results validate this hypothesis and also shed light on the competitive interactions between lower and higher lying ski areas located in the same tourism region. In fact, our results show that better snow conditions in the former reduces visitation rates in the latter. Eventually, we find that ski areas benefiting from sunny conditions tend to have, ceteris paribus, more skier visits. This suggests additional impacts if climate change were to modify sunshine duration in mountain regions.

An Exploration of the Debt Ratio of Ski Lift Operators

“…Elevation is commonly regarded as a factor critical to performance in anomalously warm winter seasons [29,[41][42][43][44]. For instance, in Australia, low natural snow cover was found to lead to a strong decline in visitors-ranging between 52 and 86 percent-for the three lowest-altitude ski resorts compared with the average number of visitors for the previous nine years [43].…”

Climate zone crucial for efficiency of ski lift operators

“…In particular, low-lying ski areas have been considerably more affected by warm winter seasons in the past than their counterparts at higher elevations (Tuppen, 2000;Hamilton, Rohall, Hayward & Keim, 2003;Unbehaun, Pröbstl & Haider, 2008;Dawson, Scott & McBoyle, 2009;Pickering, 2011;Steiger, 2011;Gonseth, 2013). Pickering (2011) finds that poor snow coverage in Australia leads to a decline in visitors by more than 50 per cent for the three lowest-altitude ski areas as compared to the average.…”

“…Snowmaking facilities can compensate for the lack of natural snow. Previous studies for the European Alps suggest that the sensitivity of skier visits to natural snow can be partly balanced by the level of snowmaking investments (Damm, Köberl & Prettenthaler, 2014;Gonseth, 2013;Steiger & Stötter, 2013). The snowmaking capacity can be measured by the percentage of ski runs or ski-able terrain equipped with snowmaking facilities.…”

Importance of early snowfall for Swedish ski resorts: Evidence based on monthly data

“…However, the strength of the relationship is not conclusive. For Swiss ski resorts, Gonseth (2013) reports that snow depth is particularly important for ski areas with poor snowmaking facilities. In a study of high elevation ski resorts in the French Alps Falk (2015) shows that variations in natural snow depth only explain a small proportion of the change in skier visits over time.…”